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Subject: Content-Length (was Re: Banner)
From: Bennett Todd (betrahul.net)
Date: Wed Jun 21 2000 - 09:34:42 CDT

2000-06-21-09:44:49 Wietse Venema:
> On the other hand, how useful is a sender-specified Content-Length
> header anyway - how could the sender possibly know about the exact
> recipient mailbox format, CRLF or LF line boundaries and such?

Do any senders encode Content-Length at all?

The only place I knew of Content-Length being used was in some
variants of mbox format; one varient (I'm quite clear on which
systems use it, or which clients on those systems) has mbox
delivery always create (or update, if there's already one there) a
Content-Length header, which is supposed to be correct; then MUAs
can use it to seek over the body to jump right to the next header,
when they're doing their initial scan of the mbox, and also they
don't need to quote "From " occuring at the beginning of a line in
the body, since the Content-Length says unambiguously where to find
the next header.

So for that use, Content-Length has no meaning aside from in the
final delivery mbox, and any such header that happens to have been
attached at any earlier point very deliberately gets stomped during
delivery.

-Bennett

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