>If that can reassure you, I have no intention of removing SHORTHDR. But I
believe it has been "special or obsolete" since around 1999 or so. I can't
vouch for the exact wording used back then, but this is nothing new!

Thank you! I'll take the reassurance.

>I find it funny that the default hop count limit went from 17 in the early
90s to 25 when people realized 17 was too little to 15 today. What wouldn't
the big ISPs do for another excuse for dropping more mail on the floor to
save money?

I sympathize with your concerns about big ISPs, but most of the people on my
list are using work addresses at companies with a major interest in data
communications. (We're an IEEE LAN standards working group.) They don't use
email services from big ISPs at all; they have company domains handling it.
That may actually be why they use so many hops within their domain, as well
as why they've left the discard thresholds at 16 hops. I think it's a
default in the SMTP code everybody ships, which nobody has bothered to
change.

I haven't seen this problem much from the subscribers in big ISP domains,
but that may be because they don't consume so many hops. AT&T, for example,
just recently went from one hop to two in delivering my email.

Hal Keen