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Is there a simple command to find out the current number of messages in the linux mail queue? mailq dumps out a verbose list, but it's not convenient for a quick overview.

I'm using Ubuntu and postfix.

danp
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4 Answers4

33

If you just want to know the number of messages sitting in the deferred queue, then the following should get you a quick answer:

find /var/spool/postfix/deferred -type f | wc -l

There are three other queues. See http://www.porcupine.org/postfix/queueing.html for details.

Brian Showalter
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18

You could filter the output and display only the last line:

mailq | tail -n 1
Martin
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4

As a related matter, you can also obtain the number of messages in your mailbox stored in mbox format, by modifying Brian Showalter's suggestion using the command "mail --headers."  For example, I have this line in my .bashrc file:

if [ -s /var/mail/$(whoami) ] ; then echo -e "\nYou have $(ls -s -h /var/mail/$(whoami) | cut -d" " -f 1) of mail.  Number of messages: $(mail --file /var/mail/$(whoami) --headers | wc -l) ($(mail --file /var/mail/$(whoami) --headers | sed '/^>* *[0-9]/d' | wc -l) unread)" ; fi
Greg Marks
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2

This is

find /var/spool/postfix/deferred -type f | wc -l

good idea, but it doesn't work if my Zabbix-Agent isn't run as a root. So I used this

NUM=`mailq | grep -E "Requests" | awk '{print $5}'`; if [ -z "$NUM" ]; then echo "0"; else echo $NUM; fi

for my own UserParameter.

Mareg
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