Re: [courier-users] Re: Message header size exceeds policy limit.

[Doug R. <sil...@sm...>]

On Wednesday 14 March 2001 06:29 am, you wrote:

> Alexei Batyr' writes:
> > Sam Varshavchik writes:
> >> It's intentional.  Nobody has any business sending mail headers that are
> >> more than 5000 bytes long, wrapped or unwrapped.
> >
> > But they DO sending them, and they don't want to be innocent victims of
> > my mail server. There is very much people who never heard about mailing
> > lists but nevertheless need to send multiple recipient messages and used
> > to send them this way.
>
> Mail relays were also used to be completely open.  Things don't work like
> that anymore.
>
> And it's not like their mail disappears.  They get an informative bounce,
> giving them a chance to do it right.  At the very least - have them BCC the
> mail, so nobody had to plow through all the garbage in the headers.

Sam,

I would question that the bounce is informative. Many users have no idea what 
a message header is or what they could have done to make it exceed the policy 
limit. No information is in the bounce message as to what the limit is and 
how they can reduce it. I know we can't be pumping back detailed explanations 
every time something goes wrong. But in this case you listed for me three 
possibilities. The sender has no idea what those possibilities might be nor 
how to diagnose them. Something more informative might be helpful, like
"The To recipient list exceeds policy limit". Or is this message determined 
by some RFC?

Thanks so much for your work and for your quick responses. I have been  
impressed by the time and effort you put into this list and in maintaining 
Courier.

Doug.