The 03.10.23 at 18:58, Jim Sabatke wrote:
No, I am not receiving files that big. The mail file can't really be that big either, maybe a couple MB at the very most. The mail files just suddenly go to that size, in this case 4 of them to that exact size on the same day. Once of them was for a low volume email list that I've only been on for a few weeks. Another thing, when I delete the files, df doesn't report a gain in disk space, and the gain should have been huge. Also, df did not show appropriate usage of disk space when the files went "big". I believe this is some kind of corruption of the files.
I think then that whatever is writing to that file is broken, gone berserk or something, and it is writing files so big simply because it can not write them bigger! I mean, that is probably your filesystem size limit for a single file. You should run a fsck on that partition, first thing, to see if there is corruption there. As for the deletion of them not gaining space, I have noticed that sometimes (specially on ext3 partitions) that the free space is not recovered immediately. Wait a bit. You can force things by umount/mount the partition. Also, it could be using "sparse" files. Now, why? Some times I have created big files (650Mb) of empty space (zeroes): dd if=/dev/zero of="empty_file" bs=1024k count=650 Then I zip (compress) that huge file to some name like thefileyourequested.zip, and email it to some "friend" of mine that had been filling up my inbox with rubbish. If he tries to open it, chances are whatever mail client he uses (specially outlook) will cough for a while - I can be "nasty" some times O:-) X'-) Well, I tell you this, because perhaps you are receiving things like that, I don't know. Your OS is old (6.3), although your mozilla (1.4) is newer than mine (1.2.1). I don't really know what program moves your mail from the inbox, but I should think it is broken, or has a weakness (security hole) used by somebody. In any case, it is going berserk, triggered on some event. You could try using an older version instead. You could try to use procmail, perhaps :-? Unless you are using mozilla to fetch your email. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson