On Sat, 2007-05-26 at 14:54 +0100, Alain Williams wrote: > Please find a link to a patch to exim-4.67 below.
>
> It introduces the option: -bpcb
> Ie -bpc (count entries in the queue) with 'b' to ignore bounces as
> bounces are often uninteresting and only get in the way when trying to
> see how many interesting mails are queued up. Part of my motivation
> was looking at what Nagios does.
You can do this with exipick, which is included with Exim:
exipick -bpc 'sender_address ne ""'
> It occurs to be that I could easily provide another 2 options:
>
> 1) -bpcB which would count entries in the queue but ONLY count bouces
exipick -bpc 'sender_address eq ""'
> 2) -bpb which would show entries in the queue but not show bounces
exipick 'sender_address ne ""'
> Please review & test the patch and discuss if you would like me to code
> either of the 2 extra options above.
If you really want to do this, it's best discussed on exim-dev.
As an aside, bounces may be uninteresting *but* knowing the normal ratio
of bounces (whether they're really bounces, autoresponses, OoO replies
etc) to real mail is definitely of interest. If your ratio suddenly
becomes massively different to your "norm", then something is happening
with your mail system (or some other system feeding into it). That in
and of itself is interesting, for obvious reasons :)
