Delete sendmail mail queue

Pedroski · 10-17-2023, 02:05 AM

I am sudo user pedro on this little cloud server using Ubuntu 22.04 Server

I am trying to delete the mail in the sendmail mail queue, but the file permissions are:

Quote:

pedro@ubuntu:/var/spool$ ls -l /var/spool/
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 May 18 02:08 cron
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 May 18 02:08 mail -> ../mail
drwxr-s--- 2 smmta smmsp 4096 Oct 17 06:41 mqueue
drwxrws--- 2 smmsp smmsp 4096 Oct 17 06:31 mqueue-client
drwx------ 2 syslog adm 4096 Dec 30 2021 rsyslog
pedro@ubuntu:/var/spool$

I can't touch the mail queue!

First I stopped the sendmail service, then tried to delete:

Quote:

pedro@ubuntu:/var/log/apache2$ sudo rm /var/spool/mqueue/*
rm: cannot remove '/var/spool/mqueue/*': No such file or directory
pedro@ubuntu:/var/log/apache2$ cd /var/spool/mqueue
-bash: cd: /var/spool/mqueue: Permission denied

I can see the mail queue with mailq or sendmail -bp, but that also takes a long time to display anything! Minutes!

What is the best way to get rid of the queue?

jayjwa · 10-17-2023, 12:30 PM

/var/spool/mqueue is your outgoing messages. If something is clogged up, stop Sendmail, become root, and delete files in that directory. Restart Sendmail. You might have a sub directory ".hoststat" in that directory, depending on your setup. Let that be. Note any message will obviously be deleted. Only do this if you made a mistake and the mail can't be sent as usual. I don't know if Ubuntu lets you login as root or not, but the basic idea is you need root permissions.

Pedroski · 10-18-2023, 12:06 AM

@jaywa

Thanks! I am trying to set up sendmail, as you know from another thread. Now these mails can't be sent, because sendmail is not yet set up right, but sendmail keeps trying to send them.

Best would be a bash script to do this!

I did it like this, hope I didn't break anything!

Quote:

pedro@ubuntu:~$ sudo su
[sudo] password for pedro:
root@ubuntu:/home/pedro# cd /var/spool/mqueue
root@ubuntu:/var/spool/mqueue# dir
df39G7KxTg009686 df39G7LxLs009694 df39H6IT1U018867 df39H6VFPZ018987 qf39G7KxTg009686 qf39G7LxLs009694 qf39H6IT1U018867 qf39H6VFPZ018987
root@ubuntu:/var/spool/mqueue# cd ..
root@ubuntu:/var/spool# service sendmail stop
root@ubuntu:/var/spool# rm -v mqueue/*
removed 'mqueue/df39G7KxTg009686'
removed 'mqueue/df39G7LxLs009694'
removed 'mqueue/df39H6IT1U018867'
removed 'mqueue/df39H6VFPZ018987'
removed 'mqueue/qf39G7KxTg009686'
removed 'mqueue/qf39G7LxLs009694'
removed 'mqueue/qf39H6IT1U018867'
removed 'mqueue/qf39H6VFPZ018987'
root@ubuntu:/var/spool# service sendmail start
root@ubuntu:/var/spool# service sendmail status