Martyn Hampson writes:
> [Nigel Metheringham writes:]
> >Last week a US site sent one of our customers a mail message. This
> >was not your common or garden message - it was 18MB in size!!!
> >The US site's gateway mailer obviously has a couple of problems... it
> >looked very much as though it had a timeout on the data part of the
> >SMTP transaction, and typically 10MB got through and then the session
> >was wrapped up and it tried again - immediately!!!
>
> We limit message size to 4 Mbytes. Although its an arbitary figure, its
> probably best to use ftp for files bigger that this.
Bear in mind that although setting message_size_limit in Exim will stop the
input/<msgid>-D files getting (much) bigger than that, the accepting process
still has to suck the remainder across the wire before giving a 552 error,
so in the scenario Nigel describes it won't stop the far end replaying the
game over and over again. And of course there are some broken MTAs out there
which won't even take 5xx at end of data as a non-retriable error.
Chris Thompson Cambridge University Computing Service,
Email: cet1@??? New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.
