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

[Joshua 'jag' Ginsberg]

Hello --

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.

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. 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.

If you have any questions regarding this change, please feel free to
contact address@hidden and we'll be happy to respond. Thank you for
your understanding in this matter.

-jag

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Joshua "jag" Ginsberg <address@hidden>
Senior Systems Administrator -- Free Software Foundation