File Size Limit in /var/spool/mail

Thomas Cameron thomas.cameron at camerontech.com
Fri Dec 16 01:17:15 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2005-12-14 at 09:40 -0600, Christofer C. Bell wrote:
> On 12/13/05, Manish Kathuria <manish at tuxspace.com> wrote:
> > Is there any limit on the size of the mail spool files in the spool
> > directory /var/spool/mail ? I have a user whose mail file is above 2 GB
> > and procmail cant write any further mails there ? AFAIK, the file size
> > limits are pretty high and in TB now.
> 
> 2GB is the maximum filesize and it's due to limitations in the
> operating system's filesystem driver, not any kind of quota.  

What?!?!  Where did you get that impression?  Have a look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems for a nice
comparison of filesystems.  The ext3 filesystem can support files up to
two terabytes.

I suspect that the issue is that the application trying to access the
file can't deal with files over 2GB.  This is an application problem,
not a filesystem issue.

Thomas




More information about the users mailing list