Procmail Max. recipe length

garion · 07-19-2012, 07:41 AM

I added a new line to an existing recipe in my /etc/procmailrc file and mail was not getting delivered as I expected. A co-worker mentioned he had heard many years ago that there was a limit to the size of a recipein procmailrc. I split the recipe is two piece and then things started working as expected.

I googled and the only thing I could find was the LINEBUF variable, which defaults to 2048. This does not seem to fit as the recipe was much less than 2048 bytes. So, I was wondering if there really is a limitation to the recipe size and whether this is the right variable.

unSpawn · 07-20-2012, 02:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by garion

I was wondering if there really is a limitation to the recipe size and whether this is the right variable.

Quote:

19.32 Variable LINEBUF

Length of the internal line buffers, cannot be set smaller than 128. All lines read from the rcfile should not exceed $LINEBUF characters before and after expansion. If not specified, it defaults to 2048. This limit, of course, does not apply to the mail itself...

Note: Beware of simply setting LINEBUF to a huge value: such an assignment causes procmail to immediately allocate twice that much memory (procmail has two buffer internally of size $LINEBUF).

(http://pm-doc.sourceforge.net/doc/)

So either your splitting corrected some error or you did have mad expansion problems. Only you know. Know for next time Procmail allows for verbose logging to file which helps debugging problems.