Postfix hold queue, release x oldest messages or all messages queued before x date

postfixqueue

I've got a private postfix relay VPS which is used by customers where they've installed their own e-mail servers in their offices and hosted over their ADSL connection. In the interests of reliable e-mail delivery, it's really not recommended to send mail directly from ISP IP addresses so I offer them the ability to use our private relay. However one of these customers has decided to send a newsletter to 5,000 recipients. I caught this straight away and dumped them all into the hold queue.

But now I'd like to try and flush this queue in batches, starting with the oldest messages.

Anyone got any ideas how to do this?
It looks like it would be a monster of a shell script to grep through the output of postqueue -p

Best Answer

If you have an idea of how old the oldest message is, you could do it with some grep and awk magic. I.e., if the oldest message is from Fri Jul 13, you could do this:

postqueue -p |grep "Fri Jul 13"|head -5000 | awk '{print "postsuper -I", $1}'|sh

to take the first 5000 messages found for that date. This doesn't do any sorting on which time during that date the mail was sent, if you want that, you could just add the hour for each hour.

Related Solutions

Linux – Configure postfix to filter email into hold queue

This is actually the way MailScanner works, so it might be an idea to have a look at the setup documentation for MailScanner/Postfix here. Basically, all email is sent to a hold queue, MailScanner scans it, and anything that's passes is put into the outbound queue.

Hopefully, ignoring the MailScanner specific parts of the doc, you'll be able to extract the Postfix setup you need.

Mailscanner & Postfix: HOLD everything except messages with a custom header

Yes there is even a solution. It is called header_checks and is part of the *_restrictions. The format (dependent on what you want) is described at it's own documentation.

But I can't recommend using after-queue-filters like Mailscanner and Spamassassin. The better way to reduce Spam and inform the sender are before-queue-filters like the built-in postscreen, client_restrictions, sender_restrictions, recipient_restrictions, before-queue milters and external tools like policyd-weight.

Only before-queue-filters reduce the load and resources on the server and can block 80% of all Spam before they even reach the server. Mailscanner in particular is on my personal "hate-list" as it only has a crippled integration into Postfix and is not able to use Postfix' built-in interfaces for anti-spam filters and filters in general.

Edit: Due to the edited question, I will answer that now.

FILTER is not an action that stops Postfix from working on the header_checks-file. It only tells "when I'm finished with the checks I'll filter". And so the next line matches and sets the mail on hold.

The solution (even if it looks crippled) is this header_checks-file:

/^X-Custom-Header:/ FILTER smtp:[ip.addr.next.hop]:10025
/^X-Custom-Header:/ OK
/^Received:/ HOLD

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – Configure postfix to filter email into hold queue

Mailscanner & Postfix: HOLD everything except messages with a custom header

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