Content-Length harmful

[Andrew Pimlott <andrew@pimlott.ne.mediaone.net>]

On Sat, Nov 28, 1998 at 01:40:34AM -0500, Avery Pennarun wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 28, 1998 at 01:19:35AM -0500, Michael Stone wrote:
> > With a proper content-length header (and an MUA bright enought to grok
> > it) you don't need to quote From's in an mbox either...
> 
> True.  But no MTA I know of trusts MUAs enough to not quote the From line,
> at least by default.
> 
> Since this is Debian, we could add policy that ALL Debian MUAs must honour
> the Content-Length (maybe they all do anyway) and MTA's should be set up to
> expect this.
> 
> I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not.

Some MUA authors don't think so.  Something about being liberal in what you
accept.  See

http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/sysadmins.html#xtocid1859727

and

http://www.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/2.0/relnotes/demo/content-length.html

The latter is a classic.

Andrew