ServerBuddies Support Blog

qmHandle - a tool for the qmail queue

qmHandle is a tool which can be used to manage the qmail message queue. It’s written in Perl (so fully customizable) and has more features than qmail-qread and qmail-qstat.

You can print queue statistics, like qmail-qstat, with color capabilities.
You can view a message in the queue.
You can remove one or more messages from the queue based on a criterion or use multiple delete requests each having its own criterion.

Download qmHandle from SourceForge. You actually only need the script ‘qmHandle’ Upload it to the server and untar it if necessary. You may download the file directly from SourceForge using the wget command:

http://optusnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/qmhandle/qmhandle-1.3.2.tar.gz

Then decompress the file using the tar command.

tar -xvzf qmhandle-1.3.2.tar.gz

First it is recommended to shutdown qmail using the service command to prevent possible corruption of the mail queue.

service qmail stop

When you are done with qmhandle be sure to start it again using the service command:

service qmail start

Use -s to see some basic statistics.

qmHandle -s

Available parameters:

-a : try to send queued messages now (qmail must be running)
-l : list message queues
-L : list local message queue
-R : list remote message queue
-s : show some statistics
-mN : display message number N
-dN : delete message number N
-Stext : delete all messages that have/contain text as Subject
-D : delete all messages in the queue (local and remote)
-V : print program version

Additional (optional) parameters:

-c : display colored output
-N : list message numbers only

Reference : http://sourceforge.net/projects/qmhandle/

Flush mail queue in sendmail

To flush the mail queue manually in sendmail servers, use

Better way

Make a backup of the existing queue directory.

Create the ‘mqueue’ directory with the same permissions and ownership. Then, type in

You can use the same command to flush any sendmail queue as some servers have multiple queue setup like mqueue, mqueue.site, clientmqueue, q1, q2 etc.