Maintenance of your Mail Queue

There may be times that you want or need to flush your mail queue by hand. For example, one of your users may send out email to a large list of addresses many of which are undeliverable. A spammer may use your server to relay email that may contain many invalid email addresses. Or the process to automatically flush your mail queue may not be working properly. The email that queues up on your server consumes your valuable disk space quota and affects the performance of your sendmail program. The directions below will help you properly maintain your virtual server's mail queue.

Your Virtual Server's mail queue is located in the ~/usr/spool/mqueue directory on your virtual server. Email in the queue is normally stored in 2 separate files. The header of each email is stored in a file with a name that starts with a "q". The rest of the file name indicates when the email was received. The body of the same email is stored in a file with a name beginning with a "d". The rest of the file name matches that of the header.

You can check the contents of your mail queue by typing this command at your virtual server prompt:

% virtual sendmail -bp

You can check the amount of your disk space quota that email in your mail queue is consuming by typing this command at the prompt:

% vdiskuse | grep mqueue

You can flush your mail queue by typing this command:

% virtual sendmail -q -v

The "-q" flag flushes the queue. The "-v" flag prints the output to the screen so you can see what is happening.