[kr0bat]

As mentioned, the SMTP protocol only allows for 1000 bytes of data per line. The author also mentions that they are sending html emails, which ignore line breaks.

So a message intended to be sent by an SMTP client:

DATA

Hello customer,<br>[978 characters] 27.00

Was erroneously formated into:

DATA

Hello customer,<br>[978 characters] 27

.00

.

The period after 27 will be removed. And this is how the html will be rendered.

Hello customer,

[Lots of text] 2700

[jiveturkey]

but html does not ignore line breaks. when part of body text, a run of whitespace (including newline) becomes a single whitespace when rendered.

so splitting 27.00 on the . becomes 27 00, because the CRLF is significant to the client.

you would want to split at whitespace, not at any other character -- unless you had a 999+ string of non-whitespace of course.

perhaps the author didn't know or didn't realize or thought it insignificant to his point that in addition there was a quoted-printable encoding, in which case i believe the trailing/mandatory CRLF can be made non significant for client rendering. personally i still would have split on actual whitespace. (well, i wouldn't have written an smtp client in the first place.)

[f33d5173]

Hmmmm, html doesn't ignore line breaks, it just treats them as any other whitespace, where a consecutive sequence is folded into a single space. 27 00 would still be quite confusing, of course

[tingletech]

I think the space character in the comment above is representing a new line on the wire.

[kr0bat]

Yep, I didn't add enough newlines. Fixed