289285 - mozilla mail composer allows to create a "To" header that exceeds mail standard (5000 characters)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

Description

[Mickael Marchand]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.4; Linux) KHTML/3.4.0 (like Gecko)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031208

Hi,   
   
I am running courier-mta as SMTP server internally in my university,    
we have users that usually try to send mails to hundreds of people (by history   
these people used Eudora and we are converting them slowly to Mozilla   
Mail/Thunderbird). This now fails because courier-mta rejects mails that have   
a "To" (or any other) header with more than 5000 characters (a quick patch in   
courier-mta allows to override that, it's a well known "issue" in courier   
apparently, look for "534 error" in the courier-users mailing list ;). The 
author of 'courier' do not want to fix that as he wants to stick to the 
standard (which looks like a sane idea to me).   
The problem is that I believe that Mozilla should not allow to write such a   
mail since it is non-standard, and this is the case with at least   
Mozilla 1.6 (the last error I just get was a mail created by mozilla-mail ;)   
maybe mozilla should warn the user that such a long To header might get   
rejected because it's non-conformant ... or maybe there is some way to split   
the header in multiple headers, I dont really know ...   
   
for now I just advice people to prefer Bcc/mailing lists etc, but mozilla   
should handle it a little better I think.   
   
Cheers,   
Mik   

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.put more than 5000 characters in a To header 
2.send to a courier-mta server 
3.read the error :) 
 
Actual Results:  
you get a "534 message header size exceeds policy" 

Expected Results:  
either split the "To", advice the users to use bcc header ...

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 2

[Mickael Marchand]

well, if you prefer to close bugs than fixing them... 
 
so Yes, the bug is still there.  

Comment 3

[Karsten Düsterloh]

Marking confirmed based on comment #2.

Comment 4

[Andrew Schultz]

==> compose

Comment 5

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

Should be fixed at least by the compose headers rewrite, if not long before then.