New submission from Martijn Pieters <m...@python.org>:

When encountering identifier headers such as Message-ID containing a msg-id 
token longer than 77 characters (including the <...> angle brackets), the email 
package folds that header using RFC 2047 encoded words, e.g.

Message-ID: 
<154810422972.4.16142961424846318...@aaf39fce-569e-473a-9453-6862595bd8da.prvt.dyno.rt.heroku.com>

becomes

Message-ID: =?utf-8?q?=3C154810422972=2E4=2E16142961424846318784=40aaf39fce-?=
 =?utf-8?q?569e-473a-9453-6862595bd8da=2Eprvt=2Edyno=2Ert=2Eheroku=2Ecom=3E?=

The msg-id token here is this long because Heroku Dyno machines use a UUID in 
the FQDN, but Heroku is hardly the only source of such long msg-id tokens. 
Microsoft's Outlook.com / Office365 email servers balk at the RFC2047 encoded 
word use here and attempt to wrap the email in a TNEF winmail.dat attachment, 
then may fail at this under some conditions that I haven't quite worked out yet 
and deliver an error message to the recipient with the helpful message "554 
5.6.0 Corrupt message content", or just deliver the ever unhelpful winmail.dat 
attachment to the unsuspecting recipient (I'm only noting these symptom here 
for future searches).

I encountered this issue with long Message-ID values generated by 
email.util.make_msgid(), but this applies to all RFC 5322 section 3.6.4 
Identification Fields headers, as well as the corresponding headers from RFC 
822 section 4.6 (covered by section 4.5.4 in 5322).

What is happening here is that the email._header_value_parser module has no 
handling for the msg-id tokens *at all*, and email.headerregistry has no 
dedicated header class for identifier headers. So these headers are parsed as 
unstructured, and folded at will.

RFC2047 section 5 on the other hand states that the msg-id token is strictly 
off-limits, and no RFC2047 encoding should be used to encode such elements. 
Because headers *can* exceed 78 characters (RFC 5322 section 2.1.1 states that 
"Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no 
more than 78 characters[.]") I think that RFC5322 msg-id tokens should simply 
not be folded, at all. The obsoleted RFC822 syntax for msg-id makes them equal 
to the addr-spec token, where the local-part (before the @) contains word 
tokens; those would be fair game but then at least apply the RFC2047 encoded 
word replacement only to those word tokens.

For now, I worked around the issue by using a custom policy that uses 998 as 
the maximum line length for identifier headers:

from email.policy import EmailPolicy

# Headers that contain msg-id values, RFC5322
MSG_ID_HEADERS = {'message-id', 'in-reply-to', 'references', 'resent-msg-id'}

class MsgIdExcemptPolicy(EmailPolicy):
    def _fold(self, name, value, *args, **kwargs):
        if name.lower() in MSG_ID_HEADERS and self.max_line_length - len(name) 
- 2 < len(value):
            # RFC 5322, section 2.1.1: "Each line of characters MUST be no
            # more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78
            # characters, excluding the CRLF.". To avoid msg-id tokens from 
being folded
            # by means of RFC2047, fold identifier lines to the max length 
instead.
            return self.clone(max_line_length=998)._fold(name, value, *args, 
**kwargs)
        return super()._fold(name, value, *args, **kwargs)

This ignores the fact that In-Reply-To and References contain foldable 
whitespace in between each msg-id, but it at least let us send email through 
smtp.office365.com again without confusing recipients.

----------
components: email
messages: 334210
nosy: barry, mjpieters, r.david.murray
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: email package folds msg-id identifiers using RFC2047 encoded words where 
it must not
versions: Python 3.7, Python 3.8

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue35805>
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