[gnu.org #678983] Re: [Savannah-help-public] problems with large emails

[Ward Vandewege via RT]

> [karl - Thu Mar 03 19:05:00 2011]:
> 
> > I don't think we want to encourage posting of large attachments.  
> 
> I agree with not "encouraging".  I don't agree (modulo bandwidth being
> lacking, granted that that trumps the policy question) with
> "forbidding".  Some packages have a reasonable expectation of large-ish
> attachments -- and a couple hundred K is not large by today's standards
> on any site I use besides lists.gnu.org :).
> 
> So IMHO, list owners should in principle be able to accept such msgs if
> they wish.  The default mailman max_message_size (the absurdly low 40)
> will already cause any large msgs to be held, so I don't see a big
> difference in practice if the MTA limit is raised.

Sure. When we move lists (next week), we'll upgrade the limit to a few
megabytes (say 4, for now).

The only reason we will have a limit after the move is to avoid
situations where someone sends a very large attachment to a very large
list (some of our lists have thousands of subscribers).

> What I could undertake to do before raising the MTA limit is change all
> the mailman lists that currently have max_message_size=0 to whatever the
> MTA limit is now.  (What is it?  200K?)

It is 200K, give or take.

> On another front, as has been said before, it would be helpful for the
> reject message to explicitly state "your message was rejected because it
> was too big" (or, even better, "... because it was bigger than nnnK").
> Regardless of what the limit is ...

Yes, this is now done.

Thanks,
Ward.


-- 
Ward Vandewege <address@hidden>
Free Software Foundation - Senior System Administrator