[Mimedefang] MaxMIMEParts

Joseph Brennan brennan at columbia.edu
Tue Mar 30 09:20:29 EST 2004



We started using "$MaxMIMEParts = 40;" after some trouble with a
user who had two accounts forwarding to each other.  Once one side
filled its disk quota it started bouncing with the original as a
mime attachment, and after a while the mail system got bogged down.
It had a couple of hundred parts before the end.

I pulled 40 out of the air, but I've never seen mail with more
than 10 parts so it seemed pretty generous.

Now a user thinks he sent a message with one attachment, and got
snagged by it.  I wish I had more information logged.  Sendmail's
from= syslog line shows me it was "size=1610247," which looks
pretty long for what the user described.  So I think the filter
did what it was configured to do.

It would be great to know how many parts it really had.  Or is
that not even known-- does it just halt when it reaches our
limit of 40?

And do we collectively have any idea whether 40 is too low?

Joseph Brennan
Academic Technologies Group, Academic Information Systems (AcIS)
Columbia University in the City of New York




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