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I used mailq command and I got a line like for example:

A705238B4C   603953 Wed May 23 11:09:58  apache@myserver.com

So, now I'm wondering is there a way where I can "read" an actual content of the mail by it's id A705238B4C

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1 Answer

up vote 7 down vote accepted

The best way is to make use of the postcat command.

postcat -q A705238B4C

At least the system I can look at right now, /var/spool/postfix is the master directory. Subdirectories of that which matter include active, deferred, bounce, etc. Queued files may be stored using the full file name (A705238B4C) or with some level of hashing depth (A/7/05238B4C).

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If you do dig down into these directories rather than using postcat, the files are part binary but mostly text so strings or hexdump are the best utilities for reading them depending on which bits you want to see. – Ladadadada May 23 '12 at 22:21
postfix queue files are RFC822 messages. There is no binary data other than in the queue headers used internally by postfix (nexthop data, queue delay etc.) – adaptr May 24 '12 at 9:50

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