Re: Length Limit for display-name

Stephan Wehner wrote:
> Section 3.4. Address Specification of RFC2822 specifies
> 
> name-addr       =       [display-name] angle-addr
> 
> What are the length limits on the display-name field? I take it a long
> display-name
> value would simply be folded as described under 2.2.3. Long Header Fields
> 
> Are there practical length limits with respect to current SMTP clients
> and servers?

Stephen,

The display name is not used in SMTP. Only the actual address is used 
at the SMTP level.

However, in the message 5322 headers itself, the MUA, mail readers, 
display systems, etc, will use the display name extracted from 
5322.From and 5322.To

The only practical limit I can think of is:

old days: 80 character limit or 72 to limit single line console display:

      12345......................80
      From: display-name

For the new days with gui, I guess that would be dependent on the GUI 
mail reader and how it is displayed and also limits it as well. We are 
still constrained with some practical limit for display a pretty 
message header frame even with GUI. GUI affords you doubling up one or 
more fields on a single row.

      From:                             Date:
      To:
      Subject

But some software will truncate and triple dot it so it fits.

     From: This User has a long Displ....  Date: xx/xx/xxxx xx:xxpm

For our backend software, we still display names to 72 characters 
since it carried on from the old days and also, before email, most of 
the time a display name was the login name, and 72 characters was 
sufficient for any person's name. :)

Also, think the growing Mobil market.  There for sure you have design 
rendering limits, but that should relaxed with the growing tablet 
market with larger screens.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Hector, Engineering & Technical Support
Santronics Software, Inc.
http://www.santronics.com (sales)
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