On Fri, 2010-07-16 at 03:40 -0700, Gnanam wrote: > Daniel Lemke wrote: > > > "The maximum message size is 256 MB." > > > > > > So, email messages that are greater than 256 MB can never be tested with > > > SA? Or is there any tweaks to get around this? > > > > You need to scan mails that are greater than 256MB?! > > Reason I'm asking this is that sometimes email attachment(s) size may be on > the higher side, that it would easily exceed 256 MB limit.
Whoa, slow down, dude. I'm with Daniel here. Fact is, spam even larger than 512 kB is rare. Sure, they do exist, and this topic comes up here every now and then. However, they still are a rare occurrence, and it is not worth the trouble raising the limit to an arbitrarily large number. The limit exists for two reasons. First, *really* large spam simply doesn't exist, and mail that size just is ham. And second, scanning really large messages will slow down SA and hog resources. It's a trade-off. Not even scanning those rare, huge spam. Versus a dramatically increased need for resources. Don't think of the max size limit as "which size *mail* do I get", but "which size *spam* do I see". Ham exceeding the threshold will just be passed along un-scanned. Really, think about it. How much spam exceeding 1 MB do you get? One a year? How much ham? Plenty, due to creative folks tossing around huge images? So, set your max size limit to something sane, say 1 MB, and live with that single spam per year sneaking through unprocessed. Sparing your servers the load of processing all the bulk of huge messages. Oh, and another one. Any chance, these huge messages might be Cc'ed to more folks on your site? Awesome, so we just multiplied the resources needed. If there are max 5 children, all fed with a piece of ham that "easily exceeds 256 MB" concurrently, will your server die a slow and horrible death of hitting swap? IMHO, if you are ever to raise the threshold to anything above 10 MB, do test it extensively before going into production. Bottom line: Keep your max size limit sane. No kidding. -- char *t="\10pse\0r\0dtu...@ghno\x4e\xc8\x79\xf4\xab\x51\x8a\x10\xf4\xf4\xc4"; main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? c<<=1: (c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; }}}