On Friday, 28.07.2000 at 09:23 -0500, Aaron Schrab wrote:
At 14:36 +0100 27 Jul 2000, Dave Ewart <ewart(_at_)icrf(_dot_)icnet(_dot_)uk>
wrote:
On reviewing the Procmail logfile, I noticed that from time to time, an
error message appeared (Error writing to "(/usr/bin/formail ..."). On
closer examination, I could see that this only happened when the message
that was being auto-replied to was "large" (for varying values of
I realised that the auto-reply recipe doesn't need to see anything other
than the headers, so I changed the recipe to:
My question is: Is there a limit on the size of message that Formail can
process?
No, formail doesn't have a limit on message size. You mentioned the
cause yourself: formail doesn't need anything other than the headers, so
it doesn't read anything else. For small messages this doesn't cause a
problem because there's enough room in various buffers that procmail is
still able to write the entire message to the pipe. But with large
messages the buffers fill up before the entire message has been written,
so procmail gets an error when trying to write to the pipe. The
solution is indeed to tell procmail to just send the headers through the
pipe (or alternatively, use a command that will read the entire
message).
OK, interesting.
So, if, for example, the Formail pipe was not part of an auto-reply
recipe and *needed* the whole message, it would fail in the manner I've
seen? And this is _not_ because Formail itself is limited in the
message size it will accept, but rather a limitation of the pipe?
I may have misunderstood you, but how will using an alternative command
(other than Formail) to process a large message help me, if the
limitation is on the amount of data sent throught the pipe?
Thanks,
Dave.
--
Dave Ewart
ewart(_at_)icrf(_dot_)icnet(_dot_)uk
Computing Manager
ICRF Cancer Epidemiology Unit, Oxford UK
_______________________________________________
procmail mailing list
procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/procmail