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TEMPORARY RESTRICTION ON E-MAIL MESSAGE SIZE
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Ever since Thanksgiving it has become increasingly difficult to prevent
the hard disk used by the e-mail system from filling up. A few days ago I
finally discovered what was causing the problem:  Large numbers of
messages with multi-megabyte file attachments that were arriving here from
all over the Internet.  Was it a mailbomb attack?  A deliberate attempt to
overload our mail system?  That's what it looked like at first glance, but
it turned out to be nothing so sinister.

It seems that a lot of you have well-meaning (but ill-advised) friends
who, in the holiday spirit, decided it would be really neat to send
graphics of snowmen, Santa Claus, Christmas trees, reindeer, menorahs,
turkeys, and other seasonal icons as e-mail file attachments. I'm sure the
senders meant no harm, but they probably didn't stop to consider how large
their graphics files were or what the effect would be at the receiving
end.

On Wednesday morning the disk filled up again, and there was nothing
expendable left to delete from the disk.  To prevent the mail system from
grinding to a halt I reconfigured sendmail to reject messages over 1 MB in
size.  That did the trick.  In fact it turned out to be more restrictive
than necessary, so I have just raised the limit to 2 MB per message.  If
the mail spool disk starts filling up again, I'll decrease the setting to
1.5 MB per message. 

The restriction will remain in effect until common sense returns to the
Internet or until the holiday spirit wanes, which ever happens first. 
Then we will revert to our normal unrestricted setting for messages size. 
Until then, if anyone tries to send a message larger than the limit,
either to or from our system, it will be returned to sender with a
"message size limit exceeded" error message.

I know some of you have legitimate, non-frivolous reasons for sending or
receiving large file attachments.  I'm sorry if this new restriction
causes any inconvenience, but there is no other way to prevent the mail
spool disk from filling up with all these frivolous file attachments.
Let's hope the restriction will no longer be necessary after the holiday
season.

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your BCPL Internet Account, please contact the BCPL Help Desk.

 Phone:   410-887-3297
 FAX:     410-887-2091
 E-Mail:  help@mail.bcpl.lib.md.us

 Help Pages:            http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/help.html
                        (or enter "help" at the UNIX shell prompt)

 System News Archives:  http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/sysnews.html
                        (or enter "sysnews" at the UNIX shell prompt)