Postfix Tips and Tricks

Inspecting Postfix’s email queue

list of queued mail

Including deferred mail and pending for delivery.

command:

mailq

The command 'postqueue -p' does the same thing as 'mailq'

process the queue now

postqueue -f

The command 'postqueue -f' does the same thing as 'postfix flush'

delete / clear the queue now

postsuper -d ALL

selective delete from queue

postsuper -d ALL deferred

inspecting queue

You can view the specific message in queue if you have the id

postcat -vq F276B2C0EA8 > themessage.txt

Replace 'F276B2C0EA8' with the postfix id of your message.

qshape active

shows the number of emails being sent to each domain and how long they have been in the active queue

qshape deferred

shows the number of emails in the deferred queue for each domain and how long they have been there

Send Mail Test

check if postfix can send emails

echo "Hello this is a test." | mail -s "Testing" admin@foo.com

follow the message by watching the log - the -f follow tells tail to actively display log activity. Be advised there is a timeout in which tail will fail to follow.

 tail -f /var/log/mail.log