procmail
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Re: procmail as MDA explodes?

1998-04-20 12:57:10
Excerpts from mail: (20-Apr-98) procmail as MDA explodes? by Nick Sayer
The machine is FreeBSD-2.2.6, and sendmail.cf has been modified
to use procmail 3.11p7 as an MDA.

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.

Is this a known problem? If so, does anyone know the fix?

It's not a bug per se in procmail. It's a known problem with certain
operating systems and their implementation of the libc system function
realloc(). There is a patch available that should fix the problem for you.
See the messages at 
<URL:http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/cgi-bin/w3glimpse/procmail?query=Albsmeier&errors=0&case=on&maxfiles=100&maxlines=30>.

Later,
Ed

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