On Fri, 2015-08-21 at 00:32 -0400, Bill Cole wrote: > On 20 Aug 2015, at 14:49, Joe Quinn wrote: > > > That said, header fields are likely never going to be long enough > > for > > what you currently have to be a performance concern. > > > > (I was about to say it was impossible, but then I saw there is no > > length limit on headers: > > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2721605/maximum-size-of-email-x- > > headers) > > On the other hand, there's no discernible downside to putting > generous hard limits outside of (and ahead of) SA for standard > headers. No matter what the RFCs say, sending mail with 600-byte From > or Subject headers is not something people who are worth > communicating with do intentionally and it can be very cheap to > reject such junk before SA sees it. > At most this deserves the possibility of writing rules that fire on the number of recipients of an e-mail. Any default rule, especially with a limit as low as 600 characters will do more harm than good. For instance, "Martin Gregorie <mar...@gregorie.org>," is 39 characters and is not unusually long for a mail address. Judging by this, your criterion would treat any list with more than about 15 recipients as over-long and well out of order.
Its quite common to find large recipient lists in newsletters sent by committee members in hobby or sports clubs. These clubs generally don't have the time or expertise to maintain a listserv. The roles of secretary and/or newsletter editor tends to change from year to year and, since they'll be sending club newsletters etc. from their own PC, its unreasonable to expect them all to use, or even know about, e-mail features such as BCC lists. I regularly get sent competition results sheets that your suggestion would reject. A recent results sheet I received has 62 recipients occupying 2336 characters. This is neither spam nor an unwanted e-mail. Martin
