Drop All Mail in Exim

Sometimes the Exim mail queue fills up with messages you no longer want: a storm of bounces, a misconfigured relay spitting out duplicates, or a test run that went sideways. Rather than removing messages one by one with exim -Mrm <id>, you can clear the entire queue in a single pass.

The One-Liner

exim -bp | awk '/^ *[0-9]+[mhd]/{print "exim -Mrm " $3}' | bash

How It Works

1. exim -bp lists the current mail queue. Each active message line begins with an age indicator like 2d, 5h, or 30m.
2. awk '/^ *[0-9]+[mhd]/{print "exim -Mrm " $3}' matches only those active-message lines (the age pattern) and prints a ready-to-run exim -Mrm command using the message ID in field 3.
3. bash executes each generated command, removing every message from the queue.

A Safer Dry Run

Before you pipe into bash, preview what will be removed:

exim -bp | awk '/^ *[0-9]+[mhd]/{print "exim -Mrm " $3}'

This prints the list of exim -Mrm commands without executing them. Confirm the IDs look right, then add | bash to actually clear the queue.

Verifying the Queue Is Empty

After the flush, confirm the queue is clear:

exim -bp

You should see No messages in queue (or an equivalent empty listing) if everything was removed successfully.

• SysAdmin

• Bash
• SysAdmin