Hi everyone:
I received over 34 replies to my mail (some of them got lost due to my mail
problem). Here is the summary.
The original question:
Someone in Japan is trying to send me a large file ( > 9MB ) via email. It has
repeatedly filled up my /var/spool and then, it terminates and starts all over
again. I have traced the machine and sent two polite notes to the postmaster
and root but to no avail. At times, I am not able to edit or read mail because
/var is full. Can someone suggest to me a remedy please?
---My comment.
The problem is that I do not even know who the file is coming from and who is it meant for. It never makes it here completely which is annoying. The /var partition fills up before it comes in fully and then, the > 9MB is deleted. It is a gross waste of network bandwidth and I [still] have no idea how to fix it.
-----
Solutions:
1. Spam him back.
Yes, I have started to do that. But I wonder if the postmaster on this machine (mansell.justnet.or.jp) ever checks what is going on.
2. Moving /var/spool/mail to another partition. 2a. Use procmail
That does not work. The problem is that the mail does not even reach /var/spool/mail :-(
3. Sendmail 8.8
I am looking into it now.
4. tcp wrappers
The tutorial states that I should use it for a while to get comfortable with it. Only then should I deny access to hosts for particular services. I have contacted a sys admin who is looking into it.
5. Moving /var/spool/mqueue.
I have done that, and moved it to a partition with > 150 MB of free space. Let us see if the problem persists. I did this an hour ago and have lived in peace ever since. However, the host has also stopped sending the message (I am running ntop in one window).
6. Ask him to send files in smaller chunks. 6a. Use ftp.
I do not even know who this guy is. The root and postmaster do not reply. :-( So, cannot be fixed in this manner.
7. Modify sendmail.cf to reject mail larger than 1MB.
Did that. The guy could still get in. But I restarted sendmail daemon only within the last hour and wonder if that had an effect as well.
8. There are several mail-garbage sites and theyare explicily listed in the example how to deal with them on: http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~ca/email/english.html
-- Sanjiv K. Bhatia Department of Mathematics & Computer Science sanjiv@aryabhat.umsl.edu University of Missouri -- St. Louis voice: (314)-516-6520 St. Louis, MO 63121-4499 fax : (314)-516-5400 http://www.cs.umsl.edu/Faculty/sanjiv.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:11:16 CDT