Looks like I am not alone in having this problem... my original post is below.

Thanks to everybody who responded: Steven Harris, Frank Cusack, Rich Pieri,

Bob Hoffman, Brian Wood, Eugene Kramer, Erwin Fritz, Pete Nelson, and Mick

Morgan.

There are a couple of sendmail answers and one UUCP answer:

in the sendmail.cf my ISP (PSInet, who says "There is nothing we can do --

we have many people with this problem and there's nothing we can do") has a

line in their sendmail.cf that reads

Muucp, P=/usr/bin/uux, F=sDFhuU, S=15, R=25, M=100000,

        A=uux - $h!rmail ($u)

and, as quoted from Bob Hoffman (future sendmail consultant for PSInet :):

>The M=100000 clause says to limit messages to 100,000 byes max. Many ISPs

>have taken this out because for most people, it is unnecessarily limiting.

>

>Your ISP will have to define another instance of the UUCP mailer that

>sets the max message size, and then make sure that mail for your site

>gets delivered by that mailer instead of the normal UUCP mailer.

>

>It is definitely not impossible, however your ISP may balk at doing this

>special case for you. This is quiet easy to do with Sendmail 8.8.7 or

>newer.

There is also a way to limit the size of the message MY sendmail daemon

accepts (which I plan on implementing on our direct-connect LAN) by setting

the MaxMessageSize parameter.

For the trick, Eugene Kramer writes:

> - watch the files as they are coming to you

> - if file reaches certain size (say 100K), chmod it to

> unreadable, chown it to root

> - restart uucico.

>

>Since file was not transmitted fully, UUCP will try to resend the file

>from your provider. Since it will not be able to create file in your

>directory, it will reject the email.

I will try this as well.

Thank you all again -- you've been most helpful.

-Harry

 On Thu, 11 Dec 1997, Harry Ford wrote:

:

:Happy Holidays all,

:

:But not very happy for me: recently, I have many users receiving emails

:with multi-megabyte attachments -- mostly SNOWMAN.AVI or greeting.exe or

:some such frivolity. Because of this, my poor 28.8 uucp modem and its

:accompanying uucp software are chocking on these files (sometimes 10 at a

:time, each in excess of 2megs).

:

:We do have plans to go to a frame relay, TCP/IP, firewall, etc. etc. in the

:future, but, in the spirit of the holiday season, I was wondering if anyone

:would share any information as to how to filter my UUCP mail for things

:like size, attachments, etc. so I don't have to download them over the

:modem in the first place. (My ISP, psinet, already said there was no way,

:but I wanted to make sure.)

:

:Running a sparc2 w/SunOS4.1.3 for the UUCP machine on our side.

:

:Thanks for your time -- I will summarize,

:Harry

---
Harry Ford *hford@economeister.com * Market News Service, New York, NY