Wietse,
On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 12:25 (-0500), Wietse Venema wrote:
> Jim:
>> On Artix, the default is 51200000. (Aside: in 1985, that would have
> Postfix has limits on everything, so that the mail system will not
> get stuck. It's really a bad idea to disable them.
I agree that changing it to "unlimited" opens one up to some risks.
And I can't make a definitive argument for any particular default
value. However, I still think that the limit of 51200000 is far too
small in this day and age.
> TL;DR: If you want a better error message, stop using procmail.
Hmmm... Thanks for the summary. On reflection, I guess I should have
realized that procmail was implicated.
> Procmail returns a status of 73, which is one of 15 status codes
> defined in /usr/include/sysexits.h. This file defines the interface
> between a mail server (such as Postfix) and an external program
> that delivers mail (such as procmail). The problem is not in
> procmail, it is in the sysexits.h interface.
> If you use Postfix itself for mailbox delivery, then the error
> message will be "File too large", one of the dozens of status codes
> defined in /usr/include/errno.h.
Indeed, that would have been more meaningful.
> On Linux, that file is the top of a forest of include files.
> Finally, if you want to keep lots of mail around, don't keep
> everything in one huge mailbox file.
I actually have a bunch of huge mailbox files ;-)
(Yeah, way too much email.)
> Instead, use Maildir format with one message per file,
I thought about that once, but I decided I have too many e-mail
messages for that. (I don't want to run out of inodes, nor do I want to
make file accesses too slow because of the number of files in the
directory.)
> or rotate files frequently like I do.
On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 12:49 (-0500), Wietse Venema wrote:
> In fact, procmail can produce its own logging which may be more
> detailed. Returning fine detail to remote senders is not needed
> (hence "can't create ... file") if there is a local log that can
> record the underlying problem details.
Also thanks for that. I guess I need to learn more about procmail
than I had really hoped to.
Thanks for the quick replies.
Jim
