Plesk clear qmail queue
Posted on November 14, 2010
I will describe today how you can clear the queue for qmail, for a server that is running Plesk. First of all you should use one of the methods described with caution. The second method described is an automation of the first method and this is why I will include both of them. This method only removes the messages from the queue, and nothing else is lost.

First of all check the number of messages from the queue using the qmail-qstat tool:

[root@test /]# /var/qmail/bin/qmail-qstat
messages in queue: 22463
messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 22

To remove the messages from the queue ALWAYS stop the qmail service first, to avoid having to reconfigure it again:

service qmail stop

Once the service is stopped execute the following commands one by one (based on the number of files stuck in the queue, this may take a while):

find /var/qmail/queue/mess -type f -exec rm {} \;
find /var/qmail/queue/info -type f -exec rm {} \;
find /var/qmail/queue/local -type f -exec rm {} \;
find /var/qmail/queue/intd -type f -exec rm {} \;
find /var/qmail/queue/todo -type f -exec rm {} \;
find /var/qmail/queue/remote -type f -exec rm {} \;

Finally start the mail service and recheck the queue to ensure that all the messages have been removed:

service qmail start

To automate this process I have two scripts available (basically are performing the same operations as above). For those that receive oversized file truncating errors please use the 2nd script – it takes a little longer but gets the job done.

wget http://dragos.fedorovici.com/qmailclear.sh
wget http://dragos.fedorovici.com/qmailclean.sh
sh qmailclean.sh
sh qmailclear.sh

 

WITH BIG THANKS TO DRAGOS FEDOROVICI.  After hours of headache, this script works like a charm.