What is the email subject length limit?

See RFC 2822, section 2.1.1 to start.

There are two limits that this standard 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.

As the RFC states later, you can work around this limit (not that you should) by folding the subject over multiple lines.

Each header field is logically a single line of characters comprising the field name, the colon, and the field body. For convenience however, and to deal with the 998/78 character limitations per line, the field body portion of a header field can be split into a multiple line representation; this is called "folding". The general rule is that wherever this standard allows for folding white space (not simply WSP characters), a CRLF may be inserted before any WSP. For example, the header field: Subject: This is a test can be represented as: Subject: This is a test

The recommendation for no more than 78 characters in the subject header sounds reasonable. No one wants to scroll to see the entire subject line, and something important might get cut off on the right.

RFC2322 states that the subject header "has no length restriction"

but to produce long headers but you need to split it across multiple lines, a process called "folding".

subject is defined as "unstructured" in RFC 5322

here's some quotes ([...] indicate stuff i omitted)

3.6.5. Informational Fields
  The informational fields are all optional.  The "Subject:" and
  "Comments:" fields are unstructured fields as defined in section
  2.2.1, [...]

2.2.1. Unstructured Header Field Bodies
  Some field bodies in this specification are defined simply as
  "unstructured" (which is specified in section 3.2.5 as any printable
  US-ASCII characters plus white space characters) with no further
  restrictions.  These are referred to as unstructured field bodies.
  Semantically, unstructured field bodies are simply to be treated as a
  single line of characters with no further processing (except for
  "folding" and "unfolding" as described in section 2.2.3).

2.2.3  [...]  An unfolded header field has no length restriction and
  therefore may be indeterminately long.

after some test: If you send an email to an outlook client, and the subject is >77 chars, and it needs to use "=?ISO" inside the subject (in my case because of accents) then OutLook will "cut" the subject in the middle of it and mesh it all that comes after, including body text, attaches, etc... all a mesh!

I have several examples like this one:

Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Actas de la obra N=BA.20100154 (Expediente N=BA.20100182) "NUEVA RED FERROVIARIA.=

TRAMO=20BEASAIN=20OESTE(Pedido=20PC10/00123-125),=20BEASAIN".?=

To:

As you see, in the subject line it cutted on char 78 with a "=" followed by 2 or 3 line feeds, then continued with the rest of the subject baddly.

It was reported to me from several customers who all where using OutLook, other email clients deal with those subjects ok.

If you have no ISO on it, it doesn't hurt, but if you add it to your subject to be nice to RFC, then you get this surprise from OutLook. Bit if you don't add the ISOs, then iPhone email will not understand it(and attach files with names using such characters will not work on iPhones).

Limits in the context of Unicode multi-byte character capabilities

While RFC5322 defines a limit of 1000 (998 + CRLF) characters, it does so in the context of headers limited to ASCII characters only.

RFC 6532 explains how to handle multi-byte Unicode characters.

Section 3.4 ( Effects on Line Length Limits ) states:

Section 2.1.1 of [RFC5322] limits lines to 998 characters and recommends that the lines be restricted to only 78 characters. This specification changes the former limit to 998 octets. (Note that, in ASCII, octets and characters are effectively the same, but this is not true in UTF-8.) The 78-character limit remains defined in terms of characters, not octets, since it is intended to address display width issues, not line-length issues.

So for example, because you are limited to 998 octets, you can't have 998 smiley faces in your subject line as each emoji of this type is 4 octets.

Using PHP to demonstrate:

Run php -a for an interactive terminal.

// Multi-byte string length:
var_export(mb_strlen("\u{0001F602}",'UTF-8'));
// 1
// ASCII string length:
var_export(strlen("\u{0001F602}"));
// 4
// ASCII substring of four octet character:
var_export(substr("\u{0001F602}",0,4));
// '😂'
// ASCI substring of four octet character truncated to 3 octets, mutating character:
var_export(substr("\u{0001F602}",0,3));
// '▒'

I don't believe that there is a formal limit here, and I'm pretty sure there isn't any hard limit specified in the RFC either, as you found.

I think that some pretty common limitations for subject lines in general (not just e-mail) are:

80 Characters

128 Characters

256 Characters

Obviously, you want to come up with something that is reasonable. If you're writing an e-mail client, you may want to go with something like 256 characters, and obviously test thoroughly against big commercial servers out there to make sure they serve your mail correctly.

Hope this helps!

What's important is which mechanism you are using the send the email. Most modern libraries (i.e. System.Net.Mail) will hide the folding from you. You just put a very long email subject line in without (CR,LF,HTAB). If you start trying to do your own folding all bets are off. It will start reporting errors. So if you are having this issue just filter out the CR,LF,HTAB and let the library do the work for you. You can usually also set the encoding text type as a separate field. No need for iso encoding in the subject line.