Postfix Mail Queue Management

To view the number of emails in the Postfix mail queue

mailq

Postfix delete mail queue: postsuper command

To delete all emails in the queue

postsuper -d ALL

To remove all mails in the deferred queue

postsuper -d ALL deferred

To remove a particular mail from the queue

postsuper -d mail_id

To remove messages from a particular domain.

mailq | grep xdomain.com | awk {'print $1'} | xargs -I{} postsuper -d {}

To remove all mails from a particular mail id

mailq | tail +2 | awk 'BEGIN { RS = "" } / [email protected]\.com$/ { print $1 }' | tr -d '*!' | postsuper -d -

To remove all mails which have [email protected] in the entire mail.

for id in `postqueue -p|grep '^[A-Z0-9]'|cut -f1 -d' '|sed 's/*//g'`; do postcat -q $id | grep [email protected] && postsuper -d $id; done

To remove all mails which have a particular pattern like “.de”

for id in `postqueue -p|grep '^[A-Z0-9]'|cut -f1 -d' '|sed 's/*//g'`; do postcat -q $id | grep “.de” && postsuper -d $id; done

Postfix queue structure

/var/spool/postfix/maildrop
/var/spool/postfix/hold
/var/spool/postfix/incoming
/var/spool/postfix/active
/var/spool/postfix/deferred
/var/spool/postfix/corrupt

Display the list of Queued mails , deferred mails, and Pending mails

postqueue -p

To Display the mail header and contents

postcat -q “Queue ID”

To check the total number of mails in the queue

postqueue -p | grep -c "^[A-Z0-9]"

To attempt to send one particular mail

postqueue -i “Queue ID”

Force mails on Postfix
To reattempt delivery of all mails in the queue

postqueue -f