23.4 Printing the Queue

When sendmail is run under the name mailq, or when it is given the -bp command-line switch, it prints the contents of the queue and exits.

Before printing the queue's contents, sendmail prereads all the qf files in the queue and sorts the mail messages internally. This is done so that the queue's contents are displayed in the same order in which the messages will be processed during a queue run.

If there are no messages in the queue (no qf files), sendmail prints the following message and exits:

Mail queue is empty

Otherwise, sendmail prints the number of messages (number of qf files) in the queue:

Mail Queue (# requests)

The # is the number of queued messages (requests) in the queue directory. If there are more than the maximum number of messages that may be processed at one time (defined by the MaxQueueRunSize option (see Section 34.8.38, MaxQueueRunSize), [4] sendmail prints

[4] Prior to V8.7 this was determined by defining QUEUESIZE in conf.h.

Mail Queue (# requests, only ## printed)

The ## is the value of the MaxQueueRunSize option.

Next, sendmail prints an attractive heading that looks like the following:

-Q-ID- -Size- ---Q-Time--- ------Sender/Recipient------
MAA12345      354 Fri Mar 15 08:32 your@your.domain
                                   george@wash.dc.gov
MAA12346*    1972 Fri Mar 15 08:45 your@your.domain
      8BITMIME   (Timed out waiting to connect to wash.dc.gov)
                                   jefferson@wash.dc.gov
MAA12347-      23 Fri Mar 15 09:32 your@your.domain
                 (Timed out waiting to connect to wash.dc.gov)
                                   jefferson@wash.dc.gov
                                   bob

The heading shows the information that is printed about each message in the queue. The items in that heading and their meanings are the following: Q-ID The queue identifier for the message: the hour character, the clocked AA part, and the pid numeric part (like MAA12345). This item can be followed by a character showing the item's status. An asterisk (* as in the second item above), means that the message is locked (an lf file was found or the qf file is locked depending on the kind of locking your version of sendmail uses). An X means that the load average is currently too high to allow delivery of the message. A minus (- as in the third item above) means that the message is too young to be processed (based on the MinQueueAge option, see Section 34.8.41, MinQueueAge). Size The size in bytes of the df file. If there is no df file (because sendmail is currently receiving this message and hasn't created one yet), this item is absent. If the message has completed processing, this prints as:

(job completed)

If the qf file is empty, this prints as

(no control file)

Q-Time The date and time that the message was first placed into the queue. This is the T line (see Section 23.9.15, T line) in the qf file converted from an unsigned integer into a more understandable date and time. Sender The sender of the message as taken from the S line (see Section 23.9.14, S line) in the qf file. Only the first 45 characters of the sender address are printed. If there is a B line (see Section 23.9.1, B line) in the qf file (as the 8BITMIME in the second item in the example above) sendmail prints that body-type (see the -B switch in Section 36.7.1, -B) on the line following the sender. If there is an M line (see Section 23.9.9, M line) in the qf file, sendmail prints the text of the error message in parentheses. Recipient After all of the above items have been printed, a list of the recipients (from each R line, see Section 23.9.13, R line, in the qf file) is printed in the order in which they are found. In the above example there is one recipient for each of the first two items and two recipients for the last item.