---
title: "View a summary of the Exim mail queue"
description: "In this article I'm going to go over how you can view a summary of the current Exim mail queue on your VPS (Virtual Private Server) or dedicated server. This will give you a quick glance of what..."
url: https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/email/view-a-summary-of-the-exim-mail-queue/
date: 2013-01-21
modified: 2021-08-16
author: "InMotion Hosting Contributor"
categories: ["Email"]
type: post
lang: en
---

# View a summary of the Exim mail queue

In this article I’m going to go over how you can view a summary of the current Exim mail queue on your VPS (Virtual Private Server) or dedicated server. This will give you a quick glance of what domains have the most mailing activity currently going on.

If you’ve read one of my previous articles on either [how to manage the Exim mail queue via SSH](/support/email/manage-the-exim-mail-queue-via-ssh/), or [managing the Exim mail queue in WHM](/support/email/manage-the-exim-mail-queue-in-whm/), then you should know how to view and manage the mail queue on your server. However in this article I’m going to talk about getting a full summary of your Exim mail queue so that you can get a quick rough idea of where the most email activity is being generated from on your server.

In order to follow along with the steps below you’ll need to have [root access](/support/server/ssh/root-access-faq/) to either your VPS or dedicated server so that you have access to the Exim commands we’ll be running.

## Viewing current Exim mail queue summary

Using the steps below I’ll show you how to view a summary of the messages currently in your Exim mail queue on your server.

1. [Login to your server via SSH](/support/server/ssh/how-to-login-ssh/) as the root user.
2. Run the following command to view the summary of the current Exim mail queue: `exim -bp | exiqsumm | egrep -v "--|Volume|^$" | sort -bg | awk '{print "Volume: " $1 " t Domain: " $5}'` **Code breakdown:** exim -bp Run the **exim** command with the **-bp** flag to show the current Exim mail queue. exiqsumm Use the **exiqsumm** command to summarize the output from the Exim mail queue. egrep -v “–|Volume|^$” | sort -bg Use the **egrep -v** command to not display any lines that include text we have specified. In this case lines that have at least two dashes **—**, the word **Volume**, or any lines that are blank identified by a carrot **^** which indicates the beginning of a line, and a dollar symbol **$** indicating the end of a line. awk ‘{print “Volume: ” $1 ” t Domain: ” $5}’ Use the **awk** command to print out the word **Volume: ** followed by the **$1**st column which is the total number of messages in the queue. Then print **Domain: ** followed by the **$5**th column of data which is the domain name. You should get back something that looks similar to this: `Volume: 70 Domain: yahoo.com Volume: 227 Domain: gmail.com Volume: 461 Domain: example.com Volume: 1402 Domain: TOTAL` So in this case we can see that in total we’ve got **1,402** messages in our Exim mail queue, **461** of those waiting to deliver for our **example.com** domain, and then **227** waiting to deliver to **gmail.com** accounts, and **70** to **yahoo.com** accounts.

You should now be able to login to your server at anytime to check on the current mail activity going on in your Exim mail queue.