How do I check the postfix queue size?

Question

What's the postfix equivalent to sendmail -bp?

score 79 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 25 '09 at 01:03

79

Or, less typing:

mailq

answered Aug 25 '09 at 01:03

womble

96,255
29
175
230

score 30 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 25 '09 at 00:56

30

postqueue -p

answered Aug 25 '09 at 00:56

Andrejs Cainikovs

1,621
1
14
20

score 29 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 13 '09 at 13:05

29

qshape active

will show you the number of emails being sent to each domain and how long they have been in the active queue

qshape deferred

will show you the same but for the deferred queue

answered Oct 13 '09 at 13:05

Alistair Prestidge

806
1
7
19

score 19 · Answer 4 · edited Aug 01 '12 at 13:05

Here's what I use, culled from the postfix mailing list. I removed the author's name, in case he doesn't want it here (you can see it at the source). It only displays totals.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

# postfix queue/s size
# author: 
# source: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/postfix-users/message/255133

use strict;
use warnings;
use Symbol;
sub count {
        my ($dir) = @_;
        my $dh = gensym();
        my $c = 0;
        opendir($dh, $dir) or die "$0: opendir: $dir: $!\n";
        while (my $f = readdir($dh)) {
                if ($f =~ m{^[A-F0-9]{5,}$}) {
                        ++$c;
                } elsif ($f =~ m{^[A-F0-9]$}) {
                        $c += count("$dir/$f");
                }
        }
        closedir($dh) or die "closedir: $dir: $!\n";
        return $c;
}
my $qdir = `postconf -h queue_directory`;
chomp($qdir);
chdir($qdir) or die "$0: chdir: $qdir: $!\n";
printf "Incoming: %d\n", count("incoming");
printf "Active: %d\n", count("active");
printf "Deferred: %d\n", count("deferred");
printf "Bounced: %d\n", count("bounce");
printf "Hold: %d\n", count("hold");
printf "Corrupt: %d\n", count("corrupt");

EDIT: Fixed a typo on line 26.

Great script, and IMHO should be a part of the standard Postfix distribution. Unlike mailq/postqueue returns immediate answer for a queue under duress — Alexander Pogrebnyak, Aug 14 '12 at 16:27
Just a word of caution on the particular implementation of `count` function. It will fail in Postfix 2.9+ when enable_long_queue_ids=yes'. I think it should not be too hard to fix it for long queue ids. — Alexander Pogrebnyak, Aug 15 '12 at 15:58
Fixed version posted below, https://serverfault.com/a/1119113/52485. — Simon Michael, Dec 30 '22 at 04:00

score 14 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 30 '15 at 08:43

14

postqueue -p | tail -n 1

Last line in the postqueue -p shows how many requests and size:

-- 317788 Kbytes in 11860 Requests.

answered Sep 30 '15 at 08:43

99 Problems - Syntax ain't one

241
2
4

1

This command executes quickly since it doesn't waste cycles displaying the individual emails in the queue. If just want the total, run this. – Paul Calabro Nov 16 '17 at 17:35

score 6 · Answer 6 · answered Jan 21 '13 at 07:08

6

[root@server ~]# time mailq | grep -c '^[0-9A-Z]'

10

real 0m1.333s

user 0m0.003s

sys 0m0.003s

(above result indicating that there are 10 email is queue)

answered Jan 21 '13 at 07:08

Business Website Design

61
1
1

3

More concisely: mailq | grep -c '^\w' – Antonio Bardazzi Mar 28 '13 at 08:51

score 6 · Answer 7 · edited Apr 06 '13 at 14:59

If you don't have qshape you can install it via the following yum commands:

yum groupinstall perl development
yum install postfix-perl-scripts

qshape prints Postfix queue domain and age distribution information. You can read more about it here:

http://www.postfix.org/QSHAPE_README.html

Example output

% qshape -s hold | head
                         T  5 10 20 40 80 160 320 640 1280 1280+
                 TOTAL 486  0  0  1  0  0   2   4  20   40   419
             yahoo.com  14  0  0  1  0  0   0   0   1    0    12
  extremepricecuts.net  13  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   2    0    11
        ms35.hinet.net  12  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0    1    11
      winnersdaily.net  12  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   2    0    10
           hotmail.com  11  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0    1    10
           worldnet.fr   6  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0    0     6
        ms41.hinet.net   6  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0    0     6
                osn.de   5  0  0  0  0  0   1   0   0    0     4

score 2 · Answer 8 · answered Apr 27 '23 at 18:18

I have jq on my system. I like the following approach a lot:

postqueue -j | jq -s 'group_by(.queue_name) | map({"queue": .[0].queue_name, "count": length})'
[
  {
    "queue": "active",
    "count": 2
  },
  {
    "queue": "deferred",
    "count": 314
  },
  {
    "queue": "hold",
    "count": 2630
  }
]

score 2 · Answer 9 · edited May 07 '19 at 17:09

2

Here is an example.

#!/bin/bash

for q in active  bounce  corrupt  defer  deferred  flush  hold  incoming  maildrop  pid  private  public  saved  trace

    do
        count=$(find /var/spool/postfix/$q ! -type d -print | wc -l)
        echo $q $count
    done

edited May 07 '19 at 17:09

Akhil

105
5

answered Feb 24 '14 at 02:57

Doug_Cowie

21
1

Simon Michael · Answer 10 · 2022-12-30T04:24:33.107

Elaborating on @mikewater's answer here, since it didn't fit in a comment: this should handle old and new postfix and also shows the total.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

# pfq - quickly print postfix queue sizes.
# Unlike mailq/postqueue returns immediate answer for a queue under duress.
#
# http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/postfix-users/message/255133,
# https://serverfault.com/a/329884/52485,
# SM

use strict;
use warnings;
use Symbol;
sub count {
    my ($dir) = @_;
    my $dh = gensym();
    my $c = 0;
    opendir($dh, $dir) or die "$0: opendir: $dir: $!\n";
    while (my $f = readdir($dh)) {
        if ($f =~ m{^([A-F0-9]|[0-9B-Zb-z]){5,}$}) {
            ++$c;
        } elsif ($f =~ m{^[A-F0-9]$}) {
            $c += count("$dir/$f");
        }
    }
    closedir($dh) or die "closedir: $dir: $!\n";
    return $c;
}
my $qdir = `postconf -h queue_directory`;
chomp($qdir);
chdir($qdir) or die "$0: chdir: $qdir: $!\n";
my $incoming = count("incoming");
my $active   = count("active");
my $deferred = count("deferred");
my $bounce   = count("bounce");
my $hold     = count("hold");
my $corrupt  = count("corrupt");
printf "Incoming: %7d\n", $incoming;
printf "Active:   %7d\n", $active;
printf "Deferred: %7d\n", $deferred;
printf "Bounced:  %7d\n", $bounce;
printf "Hold:     %7d\n", $hold;
printf "Corrupt:  %7d\n", $corrupt;
printf "-----------------\n";
printf "Total:    %7d\n", $incoming + $active + $deferred + $bounce + $hold + $corrupt;

And a wrapper to make testing easy:

#!/bin/bash                                                                                                                                                                       
# pfqcheck [N] - Check for no more than N queued postfix messages, default 50.                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                                                                  
MAX="${1:-50}"                                                                                                                                                                    
NUM=$(pfq | tail -1 | awk '{print $2;}')                                                                                                                                          
MSG="$NUM queued emails, limit is $MAX"                                                                                                                                           
if [[ $(expr "$NUM" '<=' "$MAX") == 1 ]]                                                                                                                                          
then echo "ok: $MSG"; exit 0;                                                                                                                                                     
else echo "fail: $MSG"; exit 1;                                                                                                                                                   
fi

How do I check the postfix queue size?

10 Answers10

Example output