Character limit in textarea field -- IIS or browser problem?

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From: Will Dennis (wdennis_at_bayada.com)
Date: 06/18/04 

Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 13:43:48 -0700

Hello all,

Our company is experiencing a problem with some forms on
our web site that use a textarea field where the input is
emailed. We are running IIS 6.0 on the server, and the
browser is IE 6.0. I have found that when inputting a
string of characters that exceed anywhere from 981-994
char's, depending on the CGI program used, that the CGI
emailing fails, and on the one (a commercial survey app
CGI that emails the responses) it returns the error "505
Line exceeds the maximum allowed length." Since I have
duplicated the error with another (free) form-mail CGI, I
do not believe it to be a CGI program problem. (Both
forms use the POST method, by the way.) Our mail server
does not impose a limitation on the length of a message
(and certainly has accepted and delivered messages that
greatly exceed 981+ char's!) so I also don't believe that
it's a mail server problem. Does anyone know if there is
some limitation in either MS's IIS or IE that effectively
limits the string size of a form textarea input to less
than hi-900-ish char's? I have done a bunch of Google
searches, but have not seen any problems reported like
this, except for FrontPage forms, and we don't use
FrontPage extensions to process these forms (although
FP2000 extensions are enabled on the server.)

TIA for any clues provided....

Will Dennis

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