552 Message size exceeds maximum permitted error

B3rt

Verified User
Joined
Oct 12, 2007
Messages
81
When I send big files to a mail account I get the error back:
552 Message size exceeds maximum permitted

The file size I try to send is 18.5M big, in the exim.conf the limit it set to 25M:
message_size_limit = 25M
When I set this to 50M(or higher) and restart exim I still keep getting the error and the mail is bounced back whit a notice it exceeds the limit.

In DA panel the mail is set too unlimited, also the user has enough free space to receive/store the mail.

What could cause this and how to fix?
 
Resurrecting a very old thread here... did either of you happen to solve this? I have exim.conf set to accept up to 10M attachments, and 8M attachments are failing. Very weird.
 
Not necessarily weird. Attachments can be larger than the original file size; even much larger, because of how they're encoded when they're attached to your email. Try doubling the attachment size and see if you can receive them after that.

Jeff
 
Hi Jeff! Thanks for the reply.

I'm uncomfortable increasing the already quite high message size limit. Instead I'd rather have a way of being able to consistently predict whether a given message would pass that limit, and educate my users on how to avoid this.

If I tell them "There is a 10Meg limit", and they attach an 8M PDF to a short text email, they simply don't expect it to fail (which it does in my testing). Is there a better, more accurate way of measuring the actual size of that message?
 
In the early days of email, it was a 7-bit medium. So attachments needed to be specially coded to send 8-bit characters as 7-bits. My recollection is that the recommendation was to allow for double the size to allow for the bloat during encoding.

The only way I know of to find out how big it'll be after encoding is to encode it and then check the size, since the bloat depends on exactly what you're encoding.

So if you really want to do it, you'll have to measure the size of the email after it's encoded, and allow for that.
for each email. I can't think of a reasonable way to do that, can you?

Jeff
 
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