MAILQ-TIP: A Mailq Parsing Script
Written by Jason Scott Last Updated on June 11, 2000
Purpose
	MAILQ-TIP was written because in a high-capacity mailing site using Sendmail, typing mailq can be an exercise in frustration as you attempt to parse which hosts are the most problematic, why mail isn't travelling, and generally attempting to understand what's going on with sendmail. All the information is there, but you can't just figure out the big problems "at-a-glance" when thousands of queued messages are scrolling by.
Description
	MAILQ-TIP is a perl script that uses the mailq command that comes as part of Sendmail and generates a pair of HTML report pages from the resultant information. It will also send a summary to the local screen as it does this.
Example Reports (Screenshots)
	Here is an example of a typical report generated by MAILQ-TIP, using extremely falsified domains and assuming that your site gets a very significant amount of traffic. Low-traffic sites will be bored silly by the reports generated. If you get more than 1,000 mail messages in your queue on a typical day, this script might be of use to you; otherwise, it's not for you.
Requirements
	Being a Perl Script, MAILQ-TIP requires PERL. It has only been tested with Linux and Sendmail 8.10.x. If you're running an earlier version of Sendmail, you should upgrade for three reasons: MAILQ-TIP is really neat, Sendmail 8.10+ does really great stuff with multiple mail queues and memory management, and since it's been out for more than 48 hours, security holes are being found in previous versions.
Download
	Grab the script here. It's under 20k. Current version is 1.0, released June 9, 2000.
Instructions
	After downloading the script, edit the entries in the CONFIGURATION section to tell the script where to put the resultant HTML files, to indicate what comprises a "lot" of problems for a site, and to mess with the color scheme if that sort of thing is important to you. The script can parse a 5,000 message mailq output in just under 2 seconds. It is suggested you might want to run MAILQ-TIP every 5 minutes on a heavy machine to have an instantaneous web-browsable report of why the boss isn't getting the latest figures from the field, or why your customer e-mail servers are no longer recieving pornography attachments. Or to see what e-mail servers are just down and worth calling about. You'll feel the power surge through your veins, although you will officially be called a mail nerd.
Responsible Party
	MAILQ-TIP was written by Jason Scott, who can be reached at jason@cow.net.