Maintaining Your VPS Mail Queue
When you attempt to send e-mail from your Virtual Server to an e-mail address at a server that is down
or temporarily unreachable, the e-mail is queued on your server for future delivery. There is a process
on your server's host machine that will attempt to flush your Virtual Server's mail queue every 8 hours.
After 3 days if the e-mail is still undeliverable, the mail will be returned to the sender.
There may be times that you want or need to flush your mail queue by hand. For example, one of your users
may send out e-mail to a large list of addresses many of which are undeliverable. A spammer may use your
server to relay e-mail that may contain many invalid e-mail addresses. Or the process to automatically
flush your mail queue may not be working properly. The e-mail that queues up on your server consumes your
valuable disk space quota and affects the performance of your sendmail program. The directions below will
help you properly maintain your Virtual Server's mail queue.
Your VPS's mail queue is located in the usr/spool/mqueue directory on your VPS. E-mail in the queue is
normally stored in 2 separate files. The header of each e-mail is stored in a file with a name that starts
with a "q". The rest of the file name indicates when the e-mail was received. The body of the same
e-mail is stored in a file with a name beginning with a "d". The rest of the file name matches
that of the header.
You can check the contents of your mail queue by typing this command at your VPS prompt:
% virtual sendmail -bp
You can check the amount of your disk space quota that e-mail in your mail queue is consuming by typing
this command at the prompt:
% vdiskuse | grep mqueue
You can flush your mail queue by typing this command:
% virtual sendmail -q -v
The "-q" flag flushes the queue. The "-v" flag prints the output to the screen so
you can see what is happening.
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