Looking for Exim delete mail queue operation?

Exim is a mail transfer agent (MTA) that can run as an alternative to Sendmail on Unix systems.

The main feature of MTA is to receive messages from different sources and to deliver them to their destinations.

At Bobcares, we often receive requests regarding Exim mail queue operations as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s discuss the deletion of mail queue in Exim and how our Support Engineers do it efficiently.

Exim mail queue – A quick analysis

MTA  is the software that is installed on your Linux server for the handling of email.

A message transfer agent receives incoming emails and forwards messages to individual clients/users.

The main function of the MTA is forwarding the incoming message to the proper end-user or destination.

As we all know the Exim is the mail transfer agent used on Linux systems.

Exim can accept messages from remote hosts using SMTP over TCP/IP, and as well as from local processes.

Exim has a better security record than Sendmail. Its advanced features including queue handling, address routing, and testing.

Exim mail queue

Till now we discussed the Exim mail queue. Now, let’s get discuss the commands we use to find the Exim mail queue.

Usually, to print a list of the messages in the queue, we use the below command.

exim -bp

To display the number of emails in the queue we use the command

exim -bpc

To count the emails for a particular sender we use the command

exim -bp|grep "<"|grep $user-name|wc -l

Recently one of our customers contacted us to delete all the mails in his mail queue with Exim command. Let us discuss how our Support Engineers use Exim commands to delete the queue.

Exim delete mail queue

Here our Support Engineers use Exim command with different parameters to delete the mail queue. Let’s see the different scenarios with the Exim command.

So to remove all messages from the queue, we use the below command.

exim -bp|grep "<"|awk {'print $3'}|xargs exim -Mrm

or

exim -bp | awk '/^ *[0-9]+[mhd]/{print "exim -Mrm " $3}' | bash

In this method, the command ‘exim -bp’ is used to find-out the message ID from the Exim mail queue.

And then remove the corresponding email from the mail queue by using the command ‘exim -Mrm’ as an argument.

We also use exiqgrep command to delete the mail queue.

exiqgrep -i | xargs exim -Mrm

Also, To remove a message from the queue, we use the command.

exim -Mrm {message-id}

Similarly, to remove all emails from a particular user from the queue.

exiqgrep -i -f $user | xargs exim -Mrm

Also, to remove all frozen messages, we use the below commands.

exiqgrep -z -i | xargs exim -Mrm

Therefore, using these commands, we can perform different deletion operations in the Exim mail queue for our customers.

[Need more help in mail queue deletion operations?- We’ll help you.]

Conclusion

In short, we discussed how to check the mail queue using the Exim command. Today’s writeup, we discussed how our Support Engineers perform deletion operation successfully.