Deleting pesky emails that are in the postfix queue (for whatever reason)

Sometimes, emails gets stuck on the email queue, retrying and retrying. A more unwanted scenario if there are spam mails in the queue hogging the system down (resources, bandwidth, etc). This spam might have been caused by incorrectly configured email server, a spam bot infected client that is trusted by your network, and maybe emails that are just really going nowhere for whatever reasons (again).

In Unix and Unix-like operating systems, there are quite a lot of ways to getting rid of those *unwanted* stuck emails on the email servers queue. In Postfix, you can use the postsuper -d to delete those unwanted emails on the queue. So if you have a couple of hundred emails to delete, you may want to automate this process as we don't basically want to waste most of our precious administrator time by just manually deleting this pesky emails. If you like reading manual pages, you can see that there is a fantastic one-liner to delete a number of emails from an unwanted sender, or in the case that this sender (particularly a spam) will never have mailbox on your email server so this gets stuck on the queue as being a MAILER_DAEMON pointing to non-existent address. Imagine you have thousands of this on the queue, this will easily bring your server down to its knees. What more bad is that you will be bombarded with phone calls from not so happy users.

In this kind of situation, you don't really need to panic as there will always be a way how to correct this thing. In Postfix, you can delete/purge this unwanted emails by using the command below:

Assuming that you already know the offending email address, you can substitute the "user@example.com" with the email address that is stuck in the queue. Also, take note of the correct "test" in the "if" clause, so you can basically change this accordingly to exactly match you situation.

# $7=sender, $8=recipient1, $9=recipient2

mailq | tail +2 | grep -v '^ *(' | awk  'BEGIN { RS = "" } { if ($8 == "user@example.com" && $9 == "") print $1 } ' | tr -d '*!' | postsuper -d -

Determine the offending email address as below using the mailq command:

mailq

-Queue ID- --Size-- ----Arrival Time---- -Sender/Recipient-------

3E90C13F88D3     4543 Mon Mar 29 20:03:56  ebhospeterloaninvestment@hotmail.com

(host mx1.free.fr[212.27.48.7] said: 451 too many errors from your ip (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx), please visit http://postmaster.free.fr/ (in reply to DATA command))

                                         elmore@online.fr

                                         dannye@online.fr

                                         daphacorp@online.fr

                                         darci@online.fr

                                         daryl@online.fr

                                         daveen@online.fr

                                         debra@online.fr

                                         deeyn@online.fr

                                         delila@online.fr

                                         delilah@online.fr

                                         delmore@online.fr

                                         demetri@online.fr

OK, suppose that we have an email inside the queue that is from a spam address ebhospeterloaninvestment@hotmail.com (and being a spam, it will send to X number of recipients), we can adjust our one-liner command like below. 

NOTE: I added -n to the tail command as below or you will get this error message on the shell "tail: cannot open `+2' for reading: No such file or directory". Also, take note of the "if" clause.

# mailq | tail -n +2 | grep -v '^ *(' | awk  'BEGIN { RS = "" } { if ($7 == "ebhospeterloaninvestment@hotmail.com") print $1 } ' | tr -d '*!' | postsuper -d -

postsuper: 3E90C13F88D3: removed

postsuper: Deleted: 1 message

We now just deleted one offending email stuck on the email servers queue. And this will work on multiple emails sent by this address that are stuck in the email servers queue.