Re: [Exim] Any benefits to having exim use the SIZE command?

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Author: Wakko Warner
Date:  
To: Eli
CC: 'Exim User's Mailing List'
Subject: Re: [Exim] Any benefits to having exim use the SIZE command?
> Hm yes I guess that would be quite useful, however like you said most MUAs
> don't send the SIZE paramater, and I would really only see spammers or
> outside unknown users sending inbound messages that I would want to block
> due to message size - and if they don't specify SIZE, I'd have to wait until
> DATA time to filter it out anyways.


How many spams you see that are large enough to be blocked by someone on
size alone?

> I was more wondering about its uses as exim acts as a client though - since
> that's when exim uses SIZE itself. I was reading somewhere that if a
> message is modified enough to change it's size more than size_addition (in
> an smtp transport), exim won't know the proper size of the message - I'm not
> sure if any of that is really what was written down though :P It concerns
> me though because if I have SpamAssasin running or something, and it tags a
> message as spam and redoes the message, and then goes to deliver it, but the
> user has forwarding enabled outbound, so exim handles it on it's smpt
> transport, I wouldn't want exim failing to send it since the message was
> rewritten by SA enough to throw off the SIZE value so much that it can't
> send it any more (if the remote smpt server supports SIZE that is).


I'd say in this case, just send the size that's known. As I understood it,
the size= on the mail from: line isn't to be trusted.

I could easily say "I have a 100kb message for you" and give you 10mb.

If anyone knows, at what point during the data phase would exim drop a
connection because of the message size? At some point it will have to be
dropped or aborted.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wakko Warner [mailto:wakko@animx.eu.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 12:20 PM
> To: Eli
> Cc: 'Exim User's Mailing List'
> Subject: Re: [Exim] Any benefits to having exim use the SIZE command?
>
> > I am wondering what, if any, benefits or added features or whatever are
> > gained by the additional use of the SIZE command/paramater in a MAIL
> > command?
> >
> > I ask because of all the different issues regarding size changes to
> messages
> > when the SIZE paramater is used, it almost seems like it would be
> generally
> > better to disable the use of SIZE altogether - but I wouldn't want to do
> > this if I lose other functionality.
>
> On the MUA side, some client's don't send it. One use I can see is for a
> server to refuse mail because the size is too big before wasting the
> bandwidth to send it.
>
> I setup the server at work to check this at mail and data time. At data
> time, the damage is already done (bandwidth wise and transfer time), but it
> won't go further if it's too big (wasting more bandwidth/time/disk
> space/whatever)
>
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