2008-03-25

Removing a lot of frozen mails from Exim’s mail queue

After writing my last article, I started digging into my mail configuration and after doing a quick "mailq" noticed a lot of frozen messages in Exim's queue. After inspecting the logs and the mails themselves I noticed the problem was caused by a broken POP server I retrieve mails from periodically. A few days ago something went wrong on that server and all messages were marked as unread causing my fetchmail to re-fetch all of them (about 2.5K).

Now that my mail server is configured to do sender verification and a few very old mails came from domains or systems which are non-existent today about 50 mails ended up being frozen.

But how to remove all frozen mails from Exim's queue? I ended up using mailq | grep frozen to get a list of all messages (and more importantly their message IDs) and saved that to a file. I then wrote a minimalistic Python script attached to this article to delete all those messages. Consider the script a quick and dirty hack, but it might come in handy for some of you. Get it here.

4 comments:

  1. I've been told you can type
    exim -qff

    ReplyDelete
  2. exim -qff starts an exim queue runner process and causes that process to force delivery attempts for all messages, whether frozen or not.

    The solution I described is for messages which are frozen which are impossible to deliver for various reasons. In short that means frozen messages which are never going to be deliverable. Now instead of keeping them in your queue and waiting (as I described I had 2.5K messages queued) you can get rid of all of them immediately using my solution.

    Hope this comment clarifies that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. It might be handy to learn exiqgrep and xargs. I would have removed those frozen messages without writing to a file, with a simple:

    exiqgrep -z -i|xargs exim -Mrm

    ReplyDelete