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Date:	Sun, 12 Aug 2001 20:30:23 PDT
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: REXX and e-mail

Content Type: text/plain

Robert Blair wrote:
>
> Peter, a while back you were writing
> some REXX code to send e-mails.
>
> Did you complete that project?
>
> I am having a problem with Post Road Mailer in that it
> will not send e-mails that have a TO address longer than
> 100 characters. What I would like is the source for PRM
> so the problem could be fixed but I don't think that will
> happen. So my other alterative is to write a REXX program
> to send the ones with the long address.

That guy you're trying to send an email to must have the _longest_ name
anyone has ever seen.

RFC 2821 (the new revision of RFC 821) section 4.5.3.1 covers "size
limits" and I don't see a 100-character restriction for the To:
address. RFC 2822 (the new revision of RFC 822) section 2.1.1 covers
"Line Length Limits" and recommends (but does not require) a line length
limit of 78 characters. Somewhere I've read about maximum line lengths
being 100 characters; perhaps that was in the much older RFC 821 and
822.

The program I'm writing works although I still have to test it on the
machine that belongs to the guy who wants it. It isn't an "email
client", it's the Rexx code for a daemon which 1) receives email from an
email client, 2) sends that email to an email server, 3) receives the
responses from the email server, 4) sends the responses back to the
email client. The purpose of this daemon is to allow you to do custom
filtering of any type on the email messages. In this particular case
it's handling an authentication procedure but it could do anything you
want. In other words, it contains the SMTP (outgoing mail only) code
for both a server and a client.

Since you're probably trying to use a To: line with lots of different
email addresses on it, wouldn't it be easier to simply break the address
into multiple lines? Or use Hacksaw, which is an OS/2 "spammer's tool"
-- you give it a message file and a file with the list of target email
addresses and it sends a separate message to each of the target
addresses. I've used Hacksaw a lot and it's easy to incorporate it into
more complex projects, for example extract names from a database and
send a message to just those names, or personalize each sent message
with the target's name, or merge specific text paragraphs into the
message based on the target's "profile". I can prove Hacksaw's power to
you if you like. I can send you 10,000 emails containing the strings 1
through 10000.

- Peter

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