Purge sendmail

Problem description:

Somehow your sendmail outgoing message queue got flooded by e.g. a job and you want to remove all of the messages to be delivered.


Problem resolution:

Outgoing messages in the sendmail queue are stored in /var/spool/mqueue. In order to get an overview of the messages you could execute the following sendmail command:

1	sendmail -bp

As your sendmail queue got flooded with a lot of messages, this command might take forever. So instead of querying all of the stored messages you can also check the files directly:

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[root@server01 mqueue]# pwd /var/spool/mqueue [root@server01 mqueue]# [root@server01 mqueue]# ls -al ... -rw-------  1 root smmsp    1285 18. Mai 10:35 qfr4I8ZSBn009790 -rw-------  1 root smmsp    1242 18. Mai 10:35 qfr4I8ZSu1009786 -rw-------  1 root smmsp    1233 18. Mai 10:35 qfr4I8ZumY009830 -rw-------  1 root smmsp    1253 18. Mai 10:35 qfr4I8ZUOF009794 -rw-------  1 root smmsp    1257 18. Mai 10:35 qfr4I8ZXPu009798 -rw-------  1 root smmsp    1253 18. Mai 10:35 qfr4I8ZZhj009802 ... [root@server01 mqueue]# [root@server01 mqueue]# ls -al | wc -l 34439 [root@server01 mqueue]#

There is no explicit command for removing all messages. You can directly delete them with “rm”. In order to remove all messages, we just delete the queued files:

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[root@server01 mqueue]# pwd /var/spool/mqueue [root@server01 mqueue]# [root@server01 mqueue]# rm -f * [root@server01 mqueue]# [root@server01 mqueue]# ls -al insgesamt 1128 drwx------  2 root mail 1138688 20. Mai 11:06 . drwxr-xr-x 16 root root    4096 11. Mai 2011  .. [root@server01 mqueue]#

“sendmail -bq” should now report an empty mail queue:

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[root@server01 mqueue]# sendmail -bp /var/spool/mqueue is empty           Total requests: 0 [root@server01 mqueue]#

source : http://kb.initso.at/2013/05/how-to-remove-all-messages-from-a-sendmail-mail-queue/