[Alpine-info] long MIME encoded-word subject lines

[Benjamin R. Haskell]

On Mon, 19 May 2008, Jeff Bastian wrote:


> On Mon, 19 May 2008, Benjamin R. Haskell wrote:

>> It looks like it chokes on wrapped headers.

>

> The wrapping must be done internally to alpine then.  I tested this by using 

> raw SMTP as well and did not insert any line breaks into the base64 string. 

> I sent a copy to my gmail.com account and it correctly shows the subject 

> line, and when I view the original raw email, the base64 string is not 

> wrapped.

>

> Maybe alpine is wrapping and then decoding instead of the other way around?

>


You're getting problems when sending from Alpine? or receiving?

Wrapped headers are something usually done by the initial sending 
software, but also inserted at some hop along the way. If along the way 
some resender (mailing list software, etc.) is splitting the header into 
something like

Subject: =?UTF-8?B?aaaa
 	aaaa?=

I'm pretty sure it's the sending software that's broken. A folded header 
should, if memory serves, turn out like my second example:

Subject: =?UTF-8?B?aaaa?=
 	=?UTF-8?B?aaaa?=

I think RFC2047[1] covers this. (The first example is an "encoded-word" 
that contains whitespace, which is thus broken. Yes?)

Best,
Ben

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2047#section-2