Where do I set the maximum attachment size for mutt?

Question

I have a script which emails me a database backup on a daily basis, but it recently stopped working.

Here's an example command line...

/usr/bin/mutt -s 'Backup' -f /dev/null -e 'set copy=no' -e 'set from="noreply@email.com"' -a 'backup/db.sql.gz' 'admin@email.com' </dev/null 2>&1;

When I run it manually, it shows...

Error sending message, child exited 1 ().
Could not send message.

I tried running it attaching the backup from a few days ago (when it was working), and it worked fine. It seems to be an issue with the size of the backup.

The last one that worked was 77,464 KB. A more recent one is 79,386 KB - and that fails.

I'm running on CENTOS 5.8.

I suspect it's just a setting from mutt, or possibly the mail service that mutt is using, but I'm not even sure where to find the config files to look at.

Any help appreciated!

Answer 1

Mutt doesn't set a limit, but is affected by the limit of the mail service being used. In this case EXIM.

For EXIM you can increase the limit like so...

1. Log in WHM.
2. Go to Home » Service Configuration » Exim Configuration Manager.
3. Select Advanced Editor.
4. Change message_size_limit to 200M (it was 100M).
5. Save.

After these changes my backup worked.

Answer 2

I tried a different approach. I deleted all files bigger than a certain size.
You can delete larger files, move them or rename them.

With a command similar to this:

find . -name "*.tif" -size +160k -delete

160k = 160 kilobytes, 160c = 160 bytes..