[Techtalk] Courier Mail + Debian

[Carla Schroder]

On Saturday 18 May 2002 05:46 pm, you wrote:
> Greetings.  I have a mail server running Debian at work; it uses Courier
> for IMAP, POP3, and ESMTP.  Everything is working nicely, and I am very
> happy with Courier.  Recently, however, one of my users tried to send 24 MB
> of attachments to me.  She was unable to do so, and when I tried to
> replicate the problem using my own account, I was unable to send a 10 MB
> attachment.  Appearing in /var/log/mail.err was this error message:
>
> attachment.  Appearing in /var/log/mail.err was this error message:
>
> 523 Message length exceeds administrative limit
> 523 Message length exceeds administrative limit
>
> I looked this up on Google and found only a few related pages on this
> problem.  What I found was that people had gotten around this size limit by
> specifiying the limit at the time that they compiled Courier.  I installed
> Courier from a Debian package though, so I'm not sure how to redefine the
> limit at this point on my mail server.  Courier has a lot of documentation,
> and I'm not always certain where to look.  I'm hoping someone will have
> experienced something similar and will know of a possible solution.  Thanks
> in advance to anyone who might have an answer to this problem!
>
> Elinor
>

Hi Elinor,

There are many practical reasons for not sending large attachments via email. 
My personal policy is anything over 1 meg goes via FTP or HTTP. Large email 
attachments can get mangled, and many admins configure their servers to 
reject attachments over a certain size, because they gum up the works. So 
even if you successfully configure your server to accept huge attachments, 
chances are they won't make it anyway, somewhere downstream they'll be lost.

-- 
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Carla Schroder, ace PC goddess
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