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Demo

Knowledge base

PMTA knowledge base›Command§ 6.3.29

list

The list of recipients in a queue
Who exactly is waiting, not how many

Lists recipients in queues by selection — queue, sender, recipient, job, envelope identifier, age in the queue.

The ceiling is a hundred recipients by default; –maxitems shows more. The –priority, –schedule and –greylisted options add priority, the attempt schedule and the greylisting flag to the lines.

One caveat about “read-only”: with –pause a recipient being delivered right now is paused — so that it makes it into the output.

The main trap is taking a hundred lines for the queue. The output stops at a hundred recipients: on a large queue that is a fraction of a percent, and “the address is not in the list” does not mean there is no message. Selecting by recipient answers more precisely than a long list.
What the Hub does. It does not call it: the Hub does not show messages one by one.
Recommended values

When to call it:

Question This command or not
is a message waiting for a specific recipient yes — –rcpt
what has been stuck for more than a day yes — –older-than=24h
how many messages are in the queue no — show queues
what happened to a message no longer in the queue no — acctfind
The selection options, the ceiling of a hundred recipients and the –pause action come from the manual (§ 6.3.29). The split of questions is ours.
Example configuration
# recipients of one queue and what has been stuck for more than a day
pmta list --queue=yahoo.com/vmta1pmta list --older-than=24h --maxitems=500
The first line is the manual’s example. The second searches all queues: –queue defaults to all.
yellow — — directive names, blue — blocks. They are highlighted the same way in the text of the card.
Compatibility
PowerMTA 6.0
described in the manual of this version · platform: any
The vendor does not state the first version for every directive — there is no note here. The name also appears in the 5.0 edition of the manual.
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Related entries

3 relations

Works together with

Delete messages from the queueThe same selection language: looking with that command before calling this one is the usual precaution. inference

Can be replaced by

Messages in the queueThe same thing, returned by a request. § 5.13

Where you can see it

Recipients deferred after a temporary refusalThe scheduling option is what releases deferred recipients early. § 6.3.29

Referenced from

Change the order of messagesA neighboring command: the same subject from another side. § 6.3.29Two tags the sender puts on a messageQueue listing can select by both tags. § 6.3.29

How to check on the node
Compare the list with the queue counter:
pmta show queues --no-rcpt-events yahoo.com/vmta1
If the queue holds more recipients than the list has lines, the –maxitems ceiling kicked in.
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What else to read

3 articles

◇What the node tells about itself and through which channelsSeven observation surfaces: the web monitor, the console in four formats, the log, accounting, accounting search, metrics and export to external analytics.◇The watchdog that restarts the engineKeeps an eye on the engine and brings it back up after a crash by itself, sending a crash report to the postmaster address.◇What makes a virtual machine riskyRunning on a virtual machine is possible, but the manual does not recommend it without sufficient hardware and properly tuned hypervisor settings: under load the node may stop responding.

In the Hub
Cost of a mistake
safe: a wrong value breaks nothing
Scenarios
Untangle a stuck queue · Address suppression