To delete emails from the mail queue on a Linux server, you can use the following steps:
- First, you need to access the mail queue on your server. The location of the mail queue may vary depending on your mail server software, but some common locations are:
- Postfix:
/var/spool/postfix/
- Exim:
/var/spool/exim/input/
You can use the following command to access the mail queue directory:cd /var/spool/postfix/
- Postfix:
- Once you are in the mail queue directory, you can view the list of emails in the queue using the following command:
mailq
This command will show you a list of all the emails in the queue along with their status and ID numbers. - To delete a specific email from the queue, you need to use the
postsuper
orexim
command followed by the email ID number. For example, to delete an email with the ID number12345678
, you can use the following command:- For Postfix:
postsuper -d 12345678
- For Exim:
exim -Mrm 12345678
- For Postfix:
- If you want to delete all the emails in the queue, you can use the following command:
- For Postfix:css
postsuper -d ALL
- For Exim:css
exim -bp | awk '/^ *[0-9]+[mhd]/{print "exim -Mrm " $3}' | bash
This command will delete all the emails in the mail queue.
- For Postfix:css
Note that deleting emails from the mail queue will permanently remove them from the server and they will not be delivered to their intended recipients. Therefore, you should use caution when deleting emails from the mail queue and ensure that you are only deleting unwanted or spam emails.