Deleting sendmail queue

Our monitoring system has gone a bit haywire (my fault), and has started sending me a metric asston of email notifications which should have been suppressed.

Luckily, a few more asstons of emails were queued by sendmail and we were able to delete them before it launched a second offensive.

There are a few ways to view the mail queue.

mailq

sendmail -bp

ll /var/spool/mqueue/
ll /var/spool/clientmqueue

There are also several ways to delete emails from the queue.

sendmail -v -q

Alternatively, the sendmail service can be stopped, all items from /var/spool/mqueue/ and /var/spool/clientmqueue can be deleted, and the sendmail service restarted.

Confirm the queue has been cleared with mailq or one of the other commands.