How to clear the mail queue on the appliance

Owned by Matthew Hierholzer
Last updated: Dec 17, 2024

It might happen that there are several mails in the local queue on the appliance - mails which have been created r.g., due to a misconfiguration. In this case, it might be useful to be able to clear the queue. The mail queue can be deleted via the page Manage email in the Web Configuration. On this page you can delete the emails one by one if you like. Additionally, you can delete the emails using SSH.

LAST TESTED ON CMA 1.7.9


Table of Contents

Step-by-step guide


For appliance firmware 1.6.9 and lower:

  1. Enable root access via SSH.
  2. Connect to the device as root user.
  3. Execute the mailq command to take a look at the mail queue.
  4. Run rm /var/spool/nullmailer/queue/* to delete all mails from the queue.
  5. Disable root access via SSH.


For appliance firmware 1.7.0 and higher:

  1. Enable root access via SSH.
  2. Connect to the device as root user.
  3. Execute the mailq command to take a look at the mail queue.
  4. Run postsuper -d ALL to delete all mails from the queue.
  5. Disable root access via SSH.