How do I delete the "frozen" mail in the exim queue?

Question

When emails are rejected after sending after a particular amount of time or are considered spam, Exim will place those emails in the queue and mark them as 'Frozen'.

Emails in the queue will be marked as "*** frozen ***".

These emails have already been rejected. You may want to permanently delete them from the queue.

How do I delete the "frozen" mail in the exim queue?

Answer

You will first want to check the total count of email in the queue to get a better understanding of how many emails you will be cleaning out with the following command:

exim -bp

Once you see a number of emails marked as "*** frozen ***" and want to remove them from the queue, you can delete the frozen email with the following command:

exim -bp|grep frozen|awk '{print $3}' |xargs exim -Mrm

Note: This will remove ALL frozen emails from the mail queue, which may include legitimate emails. It is not possible to recover these emails once they have been deleted.

There are some emails that may be missing their message ID, in which case, the above command will produce a (similar) error:

exim: malformed message id <> after -Mrm option

If this error is produced, use the following command to remove the remaining frozen emails:

exiqgrep –iz | xargs exim –Mrm

If the output returns that a message is locked, it's because exim is currently processing the sending of that email.

Example:

Message 1k0QaI-0007su-IM is locked