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[Julian Field]

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At 23:46 03/08/2004, you wrote:
>On Thu, Jul 29, 2004 at 08:38:57AM -0300, Mariano Absatz wrote:
> > I heard, from knowledgable people, that both Postfix and Exim are
> > nice, easy to configure and have good documentation and mailing list
> > support... the only thing that I disliked was when Julian said that
> > the queue format of Postfix is binary and not plain ASCII... this
> > scares me a lot since, in a crisis, you aren't able to use your
> > average set of text tools to resolve it...
>
>Is this really true? I know postfix queuefiles don't have linebreaks in
>them, but does that make them binary?

Yes. They are basically a sequence of records of the form:

special-magic-character-denoting-record-type
string-length-counter-encoded-using-7-bits-per-byte
record-data

There are also cross-reference records that supply byte offset counters to
various other records within the file, all of which have to be correctly
maintained. Oh, and for good measure all the recipients are listed twice in
different records (most of the time) and there is envelope information both
before and after the message body.

But it does all mean you can have a message more than 2^32 bytes long.
Where would we be without support for 4.3 terabyte messages?
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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