procmail
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Re: procmail: no space left

2004-07-15 13:53:44
At 15:15 2004-07-15 -0500, rgball wrote:
At my hosting service they use procmail to sort mail into all the various
files associated with the email aliases. I've been having lost mail problems
and have been looking at the procmail log to see if I can discover anything.
One problem I see on a very irregular basis is:

procmail: No space left to finish writing "rgb"
procmail: Truncated file to former size

BTW, the above local delivery failuer SHOULD result in a bounce to the sender, unless your ISP is using procmail in a hokey fashion.

Other than the obvious (really running out of room) what might cause this?

It's the obvious one - running out of disk space.

These errors are interleaved with successful deliveries so I can't tell what

Keep in mind that most POP mail daemons (and even shell mail clients) make copies of mailboxes when managing them (rather than running like a gap editor), and thus someone accessing a very large mailbox can consume much of the available space on a mount, because their disk use may be as much as twice the size of their mailbox for a brief period of time.

Unfortunatley, shell clients generally don't run through the POP service, and therefore when someone is accessing a huge mailbox via a shell account, there may be absolutely nothing logged when they do, wherea a POP daemon should log accesses to the maillog, so _remote_ users (or local users actually using their shell client with POP) should have their basic access logged.

A wise sysadmin should be able to focus on LARGE mailboxes and correlate those to the freespace on that mount. I've seen people with mailboxes in excess of a gigabyte, and that simply plays hell on mbox mail.

---
 Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering

 Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
 Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies.  I'll get my copy from the list.


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