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exiqsumm: Getting to know your (Exim) mail queues

Running exiqsumm a few times a day via cron is an excellent way to get a sense of what is normal for your mail queues and will help you pick up all sorts of problems.

For example:
  • Lots of mail waiting to be delivered to your local domain may indicate a local delivery problem like a broken local delivery agent (perhaps you just did a quick distribution update / upgrade and something important broke?), your mail volume has filled up, or some important, high volume user has filled up his mailbox and now his mail is just sitting on the queue?
  • Lots of mail waiting to be delivered to domain example.com? Perhaps example.com's mail server is down, or a network problem has made them unreachable?
  • Lots of mail waiting to go out to lots of different, perhaps suspiciously named, domains could indicate that your mail server is being used to relay spam.
Here's how you use it:

/usr/local/sbin/exim -bp | /usr/local/sbin/exiqsumm

Exiqsumm will give you a nice tabular summary of what is sitting in your mail queue on a per domain basis.

Count Volume Oldest Newest Domain
----- ------ ------ ------ ------

1 3276 20h 20h 0575.info
1 2048 47h 47h 1st4diaries.com
1 3891 33h 33h able-courier-inc.com
1 3481 41h 41h adelphia.com
1 3481 47h 47h alliance-lawyers.com
1 3993 18h 18h alvar.com
1 2662 37h 37h astound.net
1 2252 26h 26h bcinternet.net
1 4812 16h 16h belmarparkdental.com
5 8192 4d 3h blitzbeat.com
1 2150 47h 47h boardley.com
1 1843 47h 47h bochao.com.cn
1 2355 32h 32h brace-ingenierie.com
1 3379 13h 13h brkoday.com
1 3379 3h 3h broste.com
5 9932 5d 16h centrapoint.com
...
---------------------------------------------------------------
109 637KB 5d 2h TOTAL
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