Clearing the mail queue?

[Patrick Ware_1]

Hello,

It has been a while since I had to deal with mail on a UNIX host. Well, issued a mailq command on my system, and there is a lot of undelivered mail. How do I clear out the queue, as I don't want these massages to be sent?

Thanks in advance!

[Tim Nelson]

/var/spool/mqueue has all the mail in the queue.

delete the files in it.

[Ivan Krastev]

Here is also old thread about mqueue handling - http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=853749

You can clean up it periodicaly.


regards,
ivan

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

If access to the Internet is normal,and DNS resolution is good, most mail will be delivered in seconds.

sendmail -v -q

This will attempt to run the queue and provide verbose output for failures. You should look at some of the failures before manually clearing the mail queue.

You may find spam or something you should research before sending it to the bit bucket.

SEP

[whiteknight · Accepted solution]

Patrick,

mail-queue in the directory /var/spool/mqueue. In this directory the messages can be refound with help of the Q-ID. Each message consists of two files:

qfNAAnnnn -- Job control file (header infos)
dfNAAnnnn -- Data file (message body)

If you want to delete a message you just have to get the Q-ID with the command mailq, then you can delete the belonging qf and df file in the directory /var/spool/mqueue.

WK

[Dennis Handly]

If you use vi on the mqueue files, if you are ambitious you could redirect the mail output by changing the appropriate lines in qfNAAnnnn.

If you don't want them, in vi you could just use:
:!rm %
Then ":n" to go to the next.

[Patrick Ware_1]

Thanks guys! I ran mailq through an inefficient for loop, and grepped out the lines I didn't want to see, (like e-mail addresses, which are not shown here).

for i in `mailq |grep -v Deferred |grep -v mqueue |grep -v - |awk '{print $1}'`
do
rm /var/spool/mqueue/df$i
rm /var/spool/mqueue/qf$i
done

# mailq
/var/spool/mqueue is empty

[Geoff Wild]

Here's how I do it on my linux server:

/usr/bin/find /var/spool/mqueue/ -mtime 1 |xargs rm -f {}; > /tmp/cleanmqueue.cron.log 2>&1

For cleanliness, restart sendmail...

Rgds...Geoff

[Sandman!]

You can avoid the for-loop by leveraging awk's built-in loop for the same effect:

# ls -1 /var/spool/mqueue/* | xargs rm