procmail
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Can there be rules that only parse the headers?

1997-10-12 21:08:37
Jason Haar <Jason(_dot_)Haar(_at_)trimble(_dot_)co(_dot_)nz> writes:
This is a continuation of a query I made last week about my workstation 
grinding to a halt when procmail received a 90Mb Email message (ran out of 
memory). The point is, such message sizes are fine by me, as long as the 
system can handle it. Is there any way I could make procmail only read 
the headers of that message before scanning /etc/procmailrc/~/.procmailrc 
and acting on it? That way it wouldn't need to read the entire message 
into memory, and World peace would be assured :-) 

No, there isn't.  Hacking it in would not be non-trivial, mainly
because the current code runs with the assumption that the entire
message is there, and determining when it actually needs to see the
entire body (to do demand loading) would not be easy.  Remember that a
condition on the size of the message, ala

        :0
        * > 10000000
        /dev/null

would require the body to be read...  It really is just better to
simply have sendmail enfore the limit.  You should be doing it there
anyway to cut down on the totally trivial denial-of-service attacks and
because it's more efficient.

Philip Guenther