Monday, November 14, 2005

Cleaning up NDR stuffed mail queues

Came upon this, and was shocked it was not publicized more. Microsoft released a small utility a while ago called aqadmcli.exe. It's a command line interface for SMTP queue management. When a domain gets spammed a lot, many NDR's or non-delivery reports can occur, filling the queue with messages that may never get delivered. This utility allows you to set flags, and delete messages based on these flags. For example, you can use it to delete all mail with the "FROM" being "postmaster@yourdomain.com" to remove (very very quickly compared to the GUI ESM tool) all emails sent from postmaster@yourdomain.com (which are most likely all the NDR's that are clogging their SMTP queue.