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Just a few days ago I had the return of an email problem that I first noticed a couple of years ago and at that time there was no support for the email program I was using so I just upgraded and hoped it had gone away. It hadn't and I found out this week but this time a support system is in place so I promptly chimed in and let them know about the serious bug or flaw that I had found and asked what their advice was.
It turns out that some email system don't obey the rules and the result is that if a sender, using one of these faulty systems, includes a paragraph that is more than about one thousand characters - that's about 160 words only - without any 'returns' (pressing the 'enter' or 'return' key) then the sofware should announce an error "Line too long" but instead it just goes ahead and sends it anyway.
At the other end, the email receiver reads the message and sees nothing wrong but the email program - at least the one I was using - just truncates the line to the maximum allowed by the rules which leaves the reader with no clue that anything is wrong and worse, that anything is missing.
I have received at least three such messages and each time important information was missing.
For those who want to read the details they can check the support page here:
http://community.pmail.com/forums/thread/15822.aspx
How can you avoid getting hit by this flaw?
If you are sending emails then make sure you write paragraphs shorter than about 160 words. Separate long ones into ones that are less than 160 words. Or, better still, check that the email program you are using caters for this problem intelligently and properly.
If you get an email with paragraphs that are at least 980 characters long then you may want to check the 'raw' view, if you can, or, better still, find out for sure about your particular email program, does it cater for this problem in an accepable way or not - if not then change programs.
One of the email programs used to compose such a problem message was in fact a web mail system, more precisely it is AOL web mail.
The blame is that of systems like AOL's but it is also a failing of receiving programs when they do nothing to check for this error.
If you want to send emails to your friends to check for this then you can do two tests.
1. Write test paragraphs longer than 1,000 characters with no 'returns' and send them and ask the recipient to report their findings.
2. Write test paragraphs longer than 1,000 characters with no 'returns' but make each character a 'space' only. Then add on your 'secret' message. See who can read it and who can't!
This is not an insignificant problem so be aware of it and tell your friends about it.
By Paul E. Coughlin
SaneThinking.com
15 March 2009
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