sendmail: process the queue manually when the load average is high

Contributed by Michilimackinac January 13, 2004  
Tagged: Sendmail

This command can be useful when the load average is high (not due to sendmail) and you want to flush all the mail off the system.

sendmail -OQueueLA=100 -q 0 -v

This will run through the queue once and process what it can (assuming of course that the load average is below 100 in this case)

Note: many sendmail options in the sendmail.cf file can be overridden with the “-O” option in this fashion.