procmail
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Re: procmail Bogs Down Our Mail Server

1999-01-28 12:35:02
Solutions are available. The best one is to configure your Mail Transport
Agent (MTA) --- sendmail, or qmail, or Postfix, or whatever --- to silently
discard email bigger than a reasonable threshhold, like e.g. 64KB. Don't [try
to] bounce it, just toss it. If you could send a BSOD back down the wire to
the ignorant vermin commiting the offense that would be lovely.

The next best one is to rig your email to go to a separate server, and
configure _that_ to toss over-sized emails.

One of these days I'm hoping to finish a new mail filtering program, and one
of its design features is that it defaults to only examining the first 8KB
[configurable] of the message; it makes the filtering decision on the prefix,
then writes that to the identified output folder, then copies the remainder of
stdin to the output folder. But that's still a dream....

Or you could use maildrop[1], available now. It uses a different strategy: it
saves all messages to a tmp file.

-Bennett

[1] <URL:http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Peaks/5799/maildrop.README.html>

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