>Looking for recommendations ....
>
>The program used here is a VFP front end on an Oracle 9i backend, and I recently ran into a hiccup updating some data in our database.
>
>The contact email address for one client had increased beyond the constraints of the old field which was defined as VARCHAR 40.
>
>Because email address lengths are one the rise, what length is generally recommended?

Get the max length of addresses in your current address book (or if you can harvest them from all of your emails), then multiply that by about 2.5. That should do for a few years :).

Or, as Tamar says, go memo.