[Mimedefang] problems processing mails with many attachements

[David F. Skoll]

On Sun, 6 Oct 2002, Dirk Mueller wrote:

> > Using "-R 30000 -M 30000" should prevent the machine from dying while still
> > allowing plenty of room for legitimate messages.

> but it will now block messages that are bigger as something like 1 MB
> (because MIME::Tools keeps all of it in memory) ?

No; MIME::Tools (as used by MIMEDefang) writes the parts to disk.  It consumes
memory for each MIME part, but the amount of memory consumed is
(approximately) independent of the actual size of the MIME part.

Limiting memory consumption to 30MB should be safe.  I have never yet
seen a legitimate e-mail which caused the Perl process's virtual
memory exceed about 20MB (on x86/Linux).

I will look at modifying MIME::Tools to make it quit after a
configurable number of parts has been discovered.  I do not think a
legitimate e-mail should have more than 50 or so attachments...

Regards,

David