10 meg limit - how did it get to be 83!?

[Charles Mangin]

on most of my client accounts, i impose the SIMS default 10 megabyte 
limit for their mailbox size - if they gripe, i up it to 20 and they 
usually leave me alone. somehow, one of my clients had accumulated 83 
megs of email in her 10 meg box. someone had sent her a 39 megabyte 
file the other day, which went through, but, as she had her client set 
to leave mail on the server for 30 days, whenever she checked email 
(every five minutes) the whole server would hang up for about 20 
seconds while it churned through her mailbox. so the question is, how 
did this happen? i would expect the 39 meg mail to bounce after it 
accepted enough data to fill up the ten meg box, or for her account to 
stop accepting mail after the big mail pushed it over the limit - but 
it was clearly over the limit already if it had 83 megs... i don't 
suppose there's any mechanism in SMTP to tell what size a message is 
going to be before accepting it, eh?

oddly, she never missed any mail. all subsequent messages still got 
through, and she only started experiencing problems when the whole 
server ground to a halt - too many things tming out at the wrong time, 
i.e. while the machine was trying to churn through an 80+ meg mailbox.

also oddly, this client is not one of the ones i mentioned in my 
previous post to this list about POP timeouts. in both of those cases, 
the client mailboxes were very small - less than a megabyte. though i 
suppose the two issues may be related, i don't see how.

the solution, in the short term, was to move her mailbox file outside 
the sims folder and recreate her account - again with a 10 meg limit - 
since she doesn't seem to have missed any email.

             charles mangin | Alpha Geek and Chief Mental Hygienist
        [EMAIL PROTECTED] | What's that watermelon doing there?
     http://niftee-tron.com | http://mentalhygiene.com
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