Qmail: Force Push Mail Queue

If you find out the Nagios is alerting high queue of mail server and most of emails are legit, and the mail is stuck forever. ie. more than 1 hour, then we can start to force push mail queue. This command used within Plesk environment and shared SMTP server.

NOTE : Some of our server still using qmail. And some of our customer’s VPS and DS also.

Check the mail queue first.

/var/qmail/bin/qmail-qstat

Force push mail queue

kill -ALRM `ps ax | grep qmail-send | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'`

You can use force push mail queue command repeatedly after some x seconds. The idea is kill the old PID responding to qmail-send process and replace it with new PID, so it will make the mail sending process faster.