I recently discovered that one of our Ubuntu servers was generating dozens of notification emails a minute and throttling the Office 365 relay account it was sharing with a handful of other servers. I stopped the Postfix service on this server and disabled the scripts that were generating all of these alerts (and subsequent cascade of delivery failure messages). However, I didn't account for the Postfix Queue Manager which has retained thousands of these messages and attempts to send them all over again when I restart Postfix.
My first, admittedly bumbling, attempt to clear the queue was to navigate to the queue directory at /var/spool/postfix
and manually remove files from the 'active' and 'incoming' folders. However, when I ran postqueue -p
a ton of emails still showed up in the queue.
What is the best way to completely reset or purge a Postfix Queue?