Postfix Help

Errors and Common Configuration Parameters

Examples and Help

queue file size limit exceeded

The topic is mailbox size limit and message size limit .

By default, Postfix limits the size of an email, restricting the recipient from receiving any email size greater than the default limit. The sender of the email will receive a bounced email with an error.

Remote host said: 552 5.3.4 Error: message file too big

This default setting can be modified by adding the following line to the bottom of: /etc/postfix/main.cf

message_size_limit = 0

The zero indicates NO LIMIT. You may wish to set a limit that is reasonable.

Once you have added the above line and saved the file, you will then need to reload postfix.

postfix reload

A more reasonable example might be 20mb as a limit. Emails with attachments shall not exceed that size.

message_size_limit = 20480000

Also, you could set it to 50mb

message_size_limit = 52428800

There is also a setting for mailbox size limit.

mailbox_size_limit = 51200000

It could also be your virtual_mailbox_limit if you are piping your email to another process.

virtual_mailbox_limit = 0 

Error: Postfix - virtual_mailbox_limit is smaller than message_size_limit

Increase the value of virtual_mailbox_limit. By default, it's set to 51200000 bytes.

virtual_mailbox_limit = ${message_size_limit}0 

You can enforce a factor of 10 difference, provided the message size limit is not larger than 200MB.