Question

My application download mails over IMAP and stores them in a MySQL database. Earlier I was supporting mails size upto 10 MB and hence a ‘mediumtext’ column to store the mail content was enough. Now I need to support mails upto 30MB. So I changed the datatype for the column to ‘largetext’. Yesterday a mail with size 25 MB was stored. After that whenever I execute mysqldump command it throws error:

mysqldump: Error 2020: Got packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes when dumping table `ib_mailbox_backup` at row: 3369

Row 3369 contains the 25 MB mail.

In MySQL config I increased the ‘max_allowed_packet’ from 64M to 512M and it still fails with the same error. Executing the mysqldump command on the same machine where MySQL server is running. How do I solve this?

Answer 1

1. You can add --max_allowed_packet=512M to your mysqldump command.
2. Or add max_allowed_packet=512M to [mysqldump] section of your my.cnf (thanks @Varun)

Note: it will not work if it is not under the [mysqldump] section…