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Subject: Re: Content-Length (was Re: Banner)
From: Greg Hudson (ghudsonMIT.EDU)
Date: Wed Jun 21 2000 - 16:18:13 CDT

Liviu Daia wrote:
> On a second thought, there's also another way to look at it: in
> MIME-related legalese, the body of a message is an attachment, and
> "Content-Length" is an attribute of that attachment.

Content-Length is an HTTP invention, copied in SIP and probably some
other protocols. You won't find it in RFC 2045-2049. Applying
Content-Length to mail would seem like a mistake.

Wietse wrote:
> You lost me. How can a sender know the exact number of bytes of mail
> that is stored on a different machine, or does the count assume that
> everyone everywhere stores mail as CRLF delimited text? What about
> the Contrl-Z at the end? :-)

In HTTP, Content-Length refers to the length of the content in the TCP
stream ("anything after this many bytes is a new HTTP request") and
makes no statement about the length of the content when stored in a
file by any particular implementation.