How do I count the messages of Postfix's mailq?

Question

How can I get number of messages count in Postfix's mailq? mailq command display entire mails in mailq but i would like to know count only.Is there any command for this. My OS is centos 5.5.

Ladadadada · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-06T16:24:03.217

21

I use this:

mailq | grep -c "^[A-F0-9]"

You can pipe the output of mailq through various other filters such as uniq, sort and wc to get other statistics.

edited Oct 06 '15 at 16:24

answered Feb 21 '13 at 10:57

Ladadadada

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This is not accurate. When the Postfix queue is empty, then run 'mailq', we will get "Mail queue is empty" which also match "^[0-9A-Z]". And in such a situation it is not accurate. – andy Jul 07 '15 at 12:59
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A better regex is `^[A-F0-9]` which correctly results in 0 when the mail queue is empty. I've edited the answer. – Ladadadada Oct 06 '15 at 16:26
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How silly, the last line of the output is the count – Geoffrey Jan 02 '17 at 23:37

replay · Answer 2 · 2013-02-21T11:03:39.780

16

either mailq | tail -n 1 or find /var/spool/postfix/deferred -type f | wc -l

both works

edited Feb 21 '13 at 11:03

answered Feb 21 '13 at 10:58

replay

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I get "682430 Kbytes in 26472 Requests." for the first one and "23" for the second one. – rob Dec 18 '17 at 13:28
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The second one only shows deferred messages, adding the active queue the counts should match up: `find /var/spool/postfix/active /var/spool/postfix/deferred -type f | wc -l`. – royarisse Nov 30 '21 at 08:50

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 21 '13 at 10:57

0

Pipe the ouput to wc, if further refining is required, use grep.

answered Feb 21 '13 at 10:57

Roman

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 23 '19 at 11:18

0

I use

/usr/sbin/postqueue -p | /usr/bin/tail -n1 | /usr/bin/gawk '{print $5}'

seems quicker than grep but no 0 returns

answered Mar 23 '19 at 11:18

Stavros

101

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered May 27 '19 at 23:20

I use:

mailq | grep -c "^$"

This is essentially the same as @Ladadadada's answer of:

mailq | grep -c "^[A-F0-9]"

Except I am just looking for the empty lines which follow each message entry in the mailq log, rather than something that looks like the start of a valid message-ID. It is therefore better performance-wise, although the difference is only noticeable on very a-typical mailq log sizes.

How do I count the messages of Postfix's mailq?

5 Answers5