Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Mailing list posting size limits

[Bob Proulx]

Joshua 'jag' Ginsberg wrote:
> We've had another incident in the wee-hours of the night (eastern US)
> where a mailing list administrator disabled maximum message size limits
> on their list and a user posted a 4MB email to their list, generating
> about 1.2GB of traffic. The GNU mail system does not have infinite
> bandwidth, and posting such a message degrades quality-of-service to
> unacceptably low levels and is an unreasonable use of limited resources.

I have been routinely rejecting large messages with an explanation
message for any that I have noticed are large.  In the reject message
I ask them to either compress the attachment or to post it to one of
the many free pastebins that are available and then post a URL to it.
But it has been quite easy to miss large messages since the Mailman
web interface doesn't display the message size on the same page as the
message details.

> We have set on the MTA a hard limit on postings to lists.gnu.org.
> Messages with attachments greater than 200KB (before encoding to a 7bit
> representation) will be rejected.

Just to clarify the original poster will get an MTA rejection as
feedback?  I am imagining that it simply says something simply such as
"message too big" or some such.  Was there or is there a URL that we
could point them to with hints and instructions on how to make a large
data file available to a mailing list?

> We feel this strikes an appropriate balance between the utility of
> sending large attachments and the need to provide a reasonable
> quality of service for all GNU mail traffic.

I am certainly in agreement.

Bob