mqueue

Sendmail does not provide a command-line argument to remove messages from the mail queue. It may be necessary to manually remove messages from the mail queue rather than allowing Sendmail to attempt redelivery of messages for Timeout.queureturn days (5, by default).

The proper way to remove messages from the mail queue is to use the qtool.pl program included in the contrib subdirectory of the Sendmail source code distribution. qtool.pl uses the same file locking mechanism as Sendmail...

Adjusting sendmail queue time / lifetime

By default, sendmail will keep items in the queue for up to 5 days. If you want to make this something shorter, like 3 days, you can adjust the following in /etc/mail/sendmail.mc:

Sendmail has always been a bit like 'black magic' that works best when left to it's own devices. The rising tide of spam emails however is causing trouble that sometimes requires intervention to track down the cause of mail jams and sometimes even to manually remove emails from the server...