Madsdyd’s Weblog

March 3, 2009

Exim4 and max size of received messages in kubuntu/debian

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — madsdyd @ 8:24 am

Turns out exim3/4 at some point introduced a max size for messages it wants to receive.

If you have not changed anything, exim will refuse to accept messages larger than 50MB. I need to be able to receive mails larger than this.

Figuring out how to change it under Kubuntu/debian was a bit harder than I thought, but I got some help on irc. First of all, debian allows to configure in two “modes”: split and non-split. This assumes split, which I believe is the default:


sudo echo MESSAGE_SIZE_LIMIT=2000M >> /etc//exim4/conf.d/main/00_exim4-config_localmacrodefs
sudo update-exim4.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/exim4 restart

You can then check that the new size is set with


sudo exim4 -bP message_size_limit

Thanks to valdyn and petemc on irc.freenode.net for helping me out.

1 Comment »

  1. You can edit /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.localmacros instead of /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/00_exim4-config_localmacrodefs to achieve the same in the single config file mode.

    Comment by valdyn — March 3, 2009 @ 8:35 am


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