What are frozen emails in Exim?

Frozen mails are mails to invalid mail accounts. If the mail can’t be delivered for an account, the mail will be added in the queue and exim will try a couple of times to deliver the mail as per the settings in the RETRY CONFIGURATION in exim conf file.

If the mail cannot be delivered after eight days (timeout_frozen_after) the mail will be marked as frozen.

To check frozen emails in the queue you can use this command:

#  exim -bp | grep frozen | wc -l

To remove frozen emails from the queue you can use this command:

# bash# exim -bpru | grep frozen | awk ‘{print $3}’ |xargs exim -Mrm

Confirm frozen mail is gone by using this command to get the number of emails in the mail queue:

#  exim -bpc

The number should be lower than the start value.