Speed up queue processing in courier

Question

I'm using the Courier mail server 0.68.2 on Debian Linux. I recently had a typo in my .mailfilter file, which caused the incoming messages to stay in the queue and not getting delivered into my mailbox. When I fixed the .mailfilter file, the messages started to dribble into my mailbox, about one every 5 minutes (so it took me half a day till all the mails in the queue were finally delivered).

I noticed the following log message:

Jan  6 01:12:17 v615 courierd: Waiting.  shutdown time=none, wakeup time=Tue Jan  6 01:19:30 2015, queuedelivering=12, inprogress=1

So Courier processed a message at 01:12:17 and slept until 01:19:30 before processing the next message.

Is there a way to manually trigger processing the mail queue in Courier, or is there a way to configure a shorter waiting time?

Answer 1

_{Disclaimer: never used courier-mta}

Based on documentation page http://www.courier-mta.org/courier.html, you can use command courier flush to 'flush' queue so it can speed up processing. With this command your queue wasn't waiting like before.

"courier flush" takes all undelivered messages in the queue and attempts to deliver them immediately, instead of waiting until their next scheduled attempted delivery time. "courier flush" can be optionally followed by a message queue ID in order to schedule an immediate delivery attempt for only a single message. Message queue IDs are displayed by the mailq(1) command.