Character limit for sending mails

[Alessia]

Hi Ian,

I just tried setting up an email alert and pasted in the text I wanted sent only to find that half the message was not accepted. It appears you have set a limit on the amount of characters one can insert in an email message, or perhaps that applies to all messages. Anyway, I cannot think of any reason why there should be a limit and would appreciate your feedback on that please.

Maybe, as part of the forthcoming updated version, you could remove this limit?

[Ian Cook]

Hi Alessia

The alarm note (and hence the number of characters in the email message body) is limited to 1000 characters.

I don't if I could remove the limit, but I could increase it to say 2000 characters.
Would that be enough?

Ian

PS. Thank you for the great testimony!

[Alessia]

I'm not sure why there has to be a limit Ian? It doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
If it can't be removed, I personally would prefer you to increase it to 5000 characters. And I'm really hoping that one day it will be possible to send HTML mails.

[Ian Cook]

The limit is there because the note is stored in a field in the alarms file.
If every record in the alarms file has a 5000 character field then you can imagine how big the file would become, and how much memory it would take.

There is probably another way to address the problem, but right now I am just filling you in on why there is a restriction.

The short answer is if the note is so huge then it would probably be better to write it into a separate file, and then include the file as an attachment.

The long answer is for me to rethink how to store notes for email alarms.

Yes, in the future I do have plans for html emails from KA

Ian

[Alessia]

As this was a mail being sent to a business contact it would not be practical to add the message as an attachment. And as I understood it, the message is deleted from KAP once it has been sent. If that is correct, then I can't see the problem in storing a 5000 char message. Besides which, it's not every day one sends a message of that size. Mostly, email messages are only sent as reminders so they are generally very short.

Good news about the HTML mails!!

[Ian Cook]

as I understood it, the message is deleted from KAP once it has been sent. If that is correct, then I can't see the problem in storing a 5000 char message.

You are right, it is deleted, but the problem is that EVERY record in KA regardless of the alarm action type would have 5000 character string in it. (even though you may only use a few characters)

[Alessia]

In that case, surely the answer is to limit the 5000 char maximum to emails only. I'm not a programmer so I have no idea if that is possible or the level of complexity involved. I'm just trying to get a feeling of how it all works and what is realistically achievable.