On Thursday, December 23, 2021 3:51:57 PM EST Wietse Venema wrote: > Scott Kitterman: > > Currently, postconf.5 has this to say about message_size_limit: > > > > message_size_limit (default: 10240000) > > > > The maximal size in bytes of a message, including envelope > > information. > > > > Note: be careful when making changes. Excessively small values will > > result > > > > in the loss of non-delivery notifications, when a bounce message size > > exceeds the local or remote MTA's message size limit. > > > > > > It documents the default, but not the maximum. > > The maximum is determined by (kernel) resource limits, file system sizes, > and... > > > Apparently there is one (and > > > > who would care, one of Debian's users, apparently [1]). I'm not > > particularly confused about why there would be a maximum, but it might be > > reasonable to document what it is. Perhaps add something like "Maximum > > value is 2147483647." at the end of the note so that users don't have to > > find out the hard way: > > > > fatal: bad numerical configuration: message_size_limit = 2147483648 > > That is the LONG_MAX value for 32-bit machines. It's much bifgger > for 64-bit systems. > > I guess we could put that in the manpage. I have ab old wishlist > item to migrate file sizes from to off_t (which is 64 bits on > most systems). > > But that is a lot of effort, and I was kind-of hoping that 32-bit > systems will go away.
Thanks. I don't think it's worth a lot of effort. I'd imagine it's a pretty niche use case to send multi-gigabyte files via SMTP. People do do it though (clearly or there wouldn't be a bug). I wrestled with a few options for a simple explanation, but didn't come up with anything I particularly liked. I think it's correct that there's a hole in the documentation, but I don't have a good recommendation on how to fill it. Scott K
