There is a user here who gets some rather large e-mails. Sometimes
they are 6 or 7 MB. procmail's reaction to these is to consume
all of the available swap space on the system and die horribly.
And, of course, because the mail didn't get delivered properly,
it will get deferred and the event will recur at the next queueing
interval.
The only cure I have found is to put binmail back in as the
MDA.
procmail sometimes has problems with large messages because
it tries to store the entire thing into memory at all times. According
to Jari's pm tips:
Procmail's memory allocation technique appears to non-optimal for
some OS/libc combos (FreeBSD has been reported). It's conceivable
that the configuration process could be enhanced to detect this
system limitation to use a strategy more efficient on them. Don't
hold your breath.
There is a patch in the archives that may address this problem for
you, however. You can find it at
http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1997-10/msg00347.html
If it's an option, you can also lower your MaxMessageSize in your
sendmail.cf file (if using sendmail).
Chris