Show Queue Mode (-bp)

The sendmail program can also display the contents of its queue directories. It can do this in two ways: by running as a program named mailq or by being run as sendmail with the -bp command-line switch. Whichever way you run it, the contents of the queue are printed. If the queue is empty, sendmail prints the following:

/var/spool/mqueue is empty

If, on the other hand, mail is waiting in the queue, the output is far more verbose, possibly containing lines similar to these:

                /var/spool/mqueue (1 requests)
--Q-ID------ --Size-- ----Q-Time------ ------------Sender/Recipient------------
d8BJXvF13031*     702 Fri Dec  14 16:51 <you@here.us.edu>
              Deferred: Host fbi.dc.gov is down
                                       <george@fbi.dc.gov>

Here, the output produced with the -bp switch shows that only one mail message is in the queue. If there were more, each entry would look pretty much the same as this. Each message results in at least two lines of output.

The first line shows details about the message and the sender. The d8BJXvF13031 identifies this message in the queue directory /var/spool/mqueue. The * shows that this message is locked and currently being processed. The 702 is the size of the message body in bytes (the size of the df file as mentioned in Role in Queue Management on page 14). The date shows when this message was originally queued. The address shown is the name of the sender.

A second line might appear giving a reason for failure (if there was one). A message can be queued intentionally or because ...

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