Oh, so that’s why no one replied to my email
While wondering idly why no-one had replied to my emails for a while, I checked the status of the spool and received some delightful news:
jdb@bigbox:~$ mailq 2005-03-22 16:28:01 563 bytes 2005-03-22 18:06:25 837 bytes 2005-03-22 18:07:12 25462 bytes 2005-03-22 23:09:25 1144 bytes 2005-03-22 23:28:17 2990 bytes 2005-03-23 00:28:01 563 bytes 2005-03-23 04:07:01 562 bytes 2005-03-23 04:07:10 1068 bytes 2005-03-23 04:07:10 1206 bytes 2005-03-23 04:22:01 2054 bytes 2005-03-23 06:38:54 18937 bytes 2005-03-23 08:28:01 563 bytes 2005-03-23 10:38:16 2898 bytes 2005-03-23 10:42:10 2547 bytes 2005-03-23 10:43:40 2010 bytes 2005-03-23 10:44:26 1038 bytes 2005-03-23 11:22:40 523 bytes 2005-03-23 13:27:31 1401 bytes 2005-03-23 14:56:11 982 bytes 2005-03-23 16:14:35 3904 bytes 2005-03-23 16:28:01 561 bytes 2005-03-23 16:37:41 943 bytes 2005-03-23 19:35:21 494 bytes 2005-03-23 21:04:18 6257 bytes
Mail had been backing up for the past 24 hours and I hadn’t even noticed it. It wouldn’t be the first time this had happened – frequent wedging was one reason why I switched from exim to nullmailer, on the principle that a simpler mta would be a more reliable MTA (that, and Harvard firewalls port 25, so there was no point in running a real SMTP server anyway).
Restarting nullmailer cleared the queue, but left me wondering how to notify myself next time this happened. I couldn’t use email, for obvious reasons. I considered having a sound play through the speakers if the queue seemed wedged, but that would only work when I was at home.
I settled on a cron job to periodically dump the output from mailq to a file. My RSS reader, feedonfeeds, now prepends this file’s contents in giant honking red letters to my RSS display — procrastination via RSS now has a purpose!
While writing this, it occured to me that another solution would be to alias mutt to a script that alerted me if the queue was non-empty before running mutt:
#!/bin/sh
# warns user if WATCH's output is nonempty before running mutt
MUTT=/usr/bin/mutt
WATCH=/usr/bin/mailq
TMP=`/bin/tempfile`
$WATCH > $TMP
if [[ -s $TMP ]] ; then
less $TMP ;
fi
rm $TMP
$MUTT