Clearing postfix mail queue by domain

Linux, Postfix, Servers, Slider September 9, 2014 , by Mark Walker No Comments

Recently my phone started frantically beeping with the mail servers hard drive filling up and CPU load through the roof.

After eventually managing to login, stopping postfix the CPU came under control.

20 mins of waiting for the queue to open up and it shows 30,000 pending emails – ahhhhh!

28,500 of those were from a single domain, it appears 4 accounts from one of our clients have moved to Eastern Europe and gone on an email spree.

Webmin wouldn't be up to the task of clearing these so I needed a shell command that could clear everything by domain name.

The solution that did the job is below.

postqueue -p | tail -n +2 | awk 'BEGIN { RS = "" } / *@example\.com/ { print $1 }' | tr -d '*!' | postsuper -d –

Founder at Awcode

Mark Walker is a web developer, system administrator and entrepreneur, born in England but calling Thailand home for over a decade.

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