Tag: fetchmail

There’s a tendency for lusers to try to email anything these days. If you though a few Gig of outgoing mail queue was enough you haven’t come across the luser who decided to email the contents of a CD (uncompressed) to all her friends. Quite what they’d have made of their iPhone trying to download it I’ll never know.

Sendmail has a method for limiting emails to a sensible size. As a reminder, inside host.example.com.mc you need to add:

# The following sets the maximum message to 5Mb - otherwise it's infinite
define(`confMAX_MESSAGE_SIZE', `5242880')


Then run “make” and “make install” and “make restart”. This will generate the sendmail.cf (and any hashmaps) before restarting. The bit you always forget when changing .mc files is the “make install”. This is all for FreeBSD – Linux types, please do it your own way.

So this is great – anyone sending an over-sized email is bounced from their server, and local users submitting email will be similarly clipped into the world of sane and sensible (if you regard something as large as 5Mb as sensible for an email).

But I came across one interesting issue recently and it could happen to you, too, if you’re using fetchmail.

For those who haven’t come across it before, fetchmail pulls emails from a POP3 box and delivers them to local users – dropping them into your local MTA by default. This is reasonable, as everything then goes through the spam filtering, procmail and anything else you have defined. It’s really useful for legacy situations where someone’s ended up with a POP3 box somewhere and you need to integrate it with the rest of their mail.

Fetchmail does plenty more besides, and has a config file to match the functionality. Presumably as a reaction against the complexity of the sendmail.cf syntax, this one tries to operate in plain English. I’ve never quite figured out the full syntax, but it’s designed to be “flexible” and figure out what you’re trying to say. Personally I don’t think it succeeds in being any more friendly then sendmail.cf in spite of being on the other end of the spectrum.

Anyway, the fun comes when fetchmail downloads an over-sized email from the POP3 box and delivers it locally via Sendmail. Sendmail will reject it, and send a bounce back to the original sender. So far, so good but f Sendmail is running as a cron job every five minutes, the luser gets a bounce back every five minutes because the outsized mail is stuck in the POP3 box. Opps! It may serve them right, but they shouldn’t be allowed to suffer for too long.

Fortunately one of fetchmail’s many options allows you to control the maximum download size, if you could figure out the syntax. It’s available as a command-line option –l , but if you prefer to keep things in the .fetchmailrc file (the best plan) you’ll need to proceed as per the following example. They keywords are “limit” and “limitflush”.

• local-postmster-account is the login for your local postmaster – undelivered emails go there.
• pop3.isp.co.uk – mail server with the POP3 box
• users-domain.co.uk – Domain name who’s email ends up in POP3 box above
• pop3-username, pop3-password – what you use to log into the POP3 box
• Tom, Dick and Harry are local mailboxes, with tom being the default.
  set postmaster local-postmster-account

  poll pop3.isp.co.uk proto pop3 aka users-domain.co.uk no envelope no dns:
  user "pop3-username", with password "pop3-password",
  limit 5242368 limitflush to

  dick
  "dick@users-domain.co.uk " = dick
  "richard@users-domain.co.uk " = dick

  harry
  "harry@users-domain.co.uk " = harry

  tom
  "tom@users-domain.co.uk" = tom
  "*@ users-domain.co.uk " = tom

  here


  This isn’t intended as a tutorial in writing .fetchmailrc files – only an example of the use of limit and limitflush.

  So what’s going on? The limit keyword must be part of the poll statement, and is followed by the size (in bytes) of the maximum email to be retrieved. In the example it’s 512 bytes less than the 5Mb used in Sendmail (I feel I need a bit of slack on a boundary condition; it may be okay if they’re identical but I why push your luck?)

  Please read the fetchmail documentation for full details (although it’s light on examples). With just the “limit” keyword in use, over-sized mails will be left I the POP3 box. The following “limitflush” keyword will silently delete over-sized emails so they don’t bother you again. You may not want to do this! If you don’t, someone will have to retrieve or delete the emails form the POP3 box manually.

  Note that putting a limit on the download will prevent the bounce messages going to the original sender as it won’t get as far as sendmail.