Emails breaking due to line becoming too long

For a while I have not been getting emails since I did a server swap in late January. I was tempted to post here, but did not know how to replicate the issue (at the time it seemed inconsistent). Because it was my site, I figured that it would be really unlikely that you would have the proper tools to figure out why I wasn't getting the emails. At first I thought maybe it was a problem with Visfroms, so I installed another form extension on the side. I kept having the same problem which really got me wondering. Finally I decided to look through all my cpanel stuff and found out that the emails had been failing due to "SpamExperts". As you could imagine, someone was not happy with me. The good news is that I am pretty sure I found out the problem and a potential solution.

The Problem:

RFC 2.1.1. Line Length Limits says:

"There are two limits that this specification places on the number of characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF."

The reason some forms worked and others failed had to do with the amount of text on a single line. The more thoughtful the form submission, the more likely it was to fail. Visforms puts all or most of the text on a single line.

The Solution:
Visforms needs a method for breaking up long lines. According to the recommendation it should break up the lines every 78 characters. After all, crazy long lines aren't good practice in code anyways. This would go really appreciated. In fact, it would make my day to see this added.

Wow,

thanks a lot.
I will see how I can implement that.

Regards,
Aicha

Thanks, this goes greatly appreciated. When the change is made for this, I'd be happy to test it for you.

Any news on this? I suppose for now I could have my host disable the spam filter.

Hi Josh,

I've already taken look into this but I have no solutions yet.
Actually it looks to me as if the line limit length is mostly of concern when you want to sent encrypted mails, where as Visforms sents htm/text mails.

It is the php mailer that comes with Joomla! that finally creates the mails. This mailer does a lot of replacement and formatting and so on and actually I think, and the mailer does insert line breaks, when a mail is encrypted. But when I add some php code to Visforms, that inserts linebreaks, it looks as if the mailer actually removes those line breaks actively.

I think, I will not quickly find a solution to the problem but I will investigate further and if I find a solution I will implement it.
Sorry for the bad news.

Regards,
Aicha

Thanks for investigating into this. For now I have the spam filter disabled, seems to be working just fine at the moment. I'm not really wanting to encrypt the emails considering that it's not going into the database (unless you count the ones going to the email providers). So two questions:

- Are non encrypted emails unsafe?
- Is there a way to disable email encryption?