Milton,
I'm sorry, but I believe your partner may be incorrect. The only information I see in RFC822 that regards the length of the headers is the following:
3.4.8. FOLDING LONG HEADER FIELDS
Each header field may be represented on exactly one line con-
sisting of the name of the field and its body, and terminated
by a CRLF; this is what the parser sees. For readability, the
field-body portion of long header fields may be "folded" onto
multiple lines of the actual field. "Long" is commonly inter-
preted to mean greater than 65 or 72 characters. The former
length serves as a limit, when the message is to be viewed on
most simple terminals which use simple display software; how-
ever, the limit is not imposed by this standard.
In bold, I've highlighted the words that state that the lines may be folded for readability on older terminals. Please do note that the RFC is dated 1982, so we're already talking "simple" terminals per the standards available 25 years ago :-)
In italics I highlighted the section that states there is not limit set by this RFC.
As a reference, in RFC2821, there is instead defined a clear limit of 1,000 on the maximum length of any line in the email (SpamFilter's header is below that threshold), and the relevant section is:
text line
The maximum total length of a text line including the <CRLF> is
1000 characters (not counting the leading dot duplicated for
transparency). This number may be increased by the use of SMTP
Service Extensions.
-------------
Roberto Franceschetti
http://www.logsat.com" rel="nofollow - LogSat Software
http://www.logsat.com/sfi-spam-filter.asp" rel="nofollow - Spam Filter ISP
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