Thanks to everybody who responded: Steven Harris, Frank Cusack, Rich Pieri,
Bob Hoffman, Brian Wood, Eugene Kramer, Erwin Fritz, Pete Nelson, and Mick
Morgan.
There are a couple of sendmail answers and one UUCP answer:
in the sendmail.cf my ISP (PSInet, who says "There is nothing we can do --
we have many people with this problem and there's nothing we can do") has a
line in their sendmail.cf that reads
Muucp, P=/usr/bin/uux, F=sDFhuU, S=15, R=25, M=100000,
A=uux - $h!rmail ($u)
and, as quoted from Bob Hoffman (future sendmail consultant for PSInet :):
>The M=100000 clause says to limit messages to 100,000 byes max. Many ISPs
>have taken this out because for most people, it is unnecessarily limiting.
>
>Your ISP will have to define another instance of the UUCP mailer that
>sets the max message size, and then make sure that mail for your site
>gets delivered by that mailer instead of the normal UUCP mailer.
>
>It is definitely not impossible, however your ISP may balk at doing this
>special case for you. This is quiet easy to do with Sendmail 8.8.7 or
>newer.
There is also a way to limit the size of the message MY sendmail daemon
accepts (which I plan on implementing on our direct-connect LAN) by setting
the MaxMessageSize parameter.
For the trick, Eugene Kramer writes:
> - watch the files as they are coming to you
> - if file reaches certain size (say 100K), chmod it to
> unreadable, chown it to root
> - restart uucico.
>
>Since file was not transmitted fully, UUCP will try to resend the file
>from your provider. Since it will not be able to create file in your
>directory, it will reject the email.
I will try this as well.
Thank you all again -- you've been most helpful.
-Harry
On Thu, 11 Dec 1997, Harry Ford wrote:
:
:Happy Holidays all,
:
:But not very happy for me: recently, I have many users receiving emails
:with multi-megabyte attachments -- mostly SNOWMAN.AVI or greeting.exe or
:some such frivolity. Because of this, my poor 28.8 uucp modem and its
:accompanying uucp software are chocking on these files (sometimes 10 at a
:time, each in excess of 2megs).
:
:We do have plans to go to a frame relay, TCP/IP, firewall, etc. etc. in the
:future, but, in the spirit of the holiday season, I was wondering if anyone
:would share any information as to how to filter my UUCP mail for things
:like size, attachments, etc. so I don't have to download them over the
:modem in the first place. (My ISP, psinet, already said there was no way,
:but I wanted to make sure.)
:
:Running a sparc2 w/SunOS4.1.3 for the UUCP machine on our side.
:
:Thanks for your time -- I will summarize,
:Harry
--- Harry Ford * hford@economeister.com * Market News Service, New York, NY