Sendmail debugging: watch queue processing

Contributed by Rex December 1, 2003  
Tagged: Sendmail

In the course of troubleshooting sendmail problems, it is sometimes helpful to watch sendmail do its thing. If there is a backlog of messages in the queue, you can run sendmail manually with a verbose option to make it act as a queue runner and see what it is doing and possibly why it is not doing what you think it should.

To watch sendmail process messages in the queue:

sendmail -q -v

In some operating systems, the sendmail binary is not in the path (in Solaris, for example, you would use /usr/lib/sendmail -q -v). If you need to find the fully qualified path to sendmail, see this recipe.