On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 8:28:54AM -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
If you're so worried about bandwidth charges that you're refusing
oversized messages, you're not running in daemon mode anyway because
I suspect this isn't really a fetchmail problem, but I find that
messages over about 250K cause a pop3 timeout, aren't deleted, and
thus bring mail fetching to a halt---fetchmail just keeps fetching
the same large mail, failing, re-fetching it next poll, etc. ad nauseum.
So I filter such things at my ISP with procmail, diverting the
occasional huge thing to a separate file, and dropping an
informative heads-up into my pop3 mailbox, so I know to have a
look and maybe download the thing via ssh.
My point is that some of us "limit" the size of things not for
bandwidth charges, but because they simply won't fit through
this particular pipe at all. I don't use fetchmail's limit
option, fwiw, since I don't want the huge things in that pop3
file at all.
My ISP has been silent to my queries on this subject, so I've
learned the limit by trial and error. I also don't know if
the problem will disappear when I upgrade to a more current
fetchmail from my current 5.9.0.
Jim