Documentation

This is the job that makes the queue a queue. Without it, failed mails stay queued forever.

Each run delivers at most 50 due entries, so a large backlog drains at roughly 50 mails per minute. Before delivering, the run recovers entries stuck in sending from a crashed previous run—anything claimed for more than 15 minutes goes back to queued.

The run also evaluates queue health and fires the alert webhook on a state change. Under a hold it delivers nothing but still evaluates health, so the widget reflects the growing queue.

TYPO3's own mailer:spool:send also flushes this queue.

Removes, after the configured retentions:

• sent entries older than sentRetentionDays (30 days by default)
• failed entries without a payload file, older than failedRetentionDays (90 days by default)
• failed entries with a payload file, after the shorter attachmentRetentionDays (14 days by default). The two failed retentions are mutually exclusive—each entry falls under exactly one of them, depending on whether its payload lives in a file
• queued entries older than queuedRetentionDays—only when that is set to a positive value; the default 0 disables it so production retries are never dropped early
• The payload files belonging to those rows, plus a date-based sweep for orphaned files

Wipes one status in one go, rows and payload files together. --status defaults to queued; failed and sent are allowed the same way. --force (short: -f) is required for the destructive run; without it, nothing is deleted.

The typical use is clearing a staging queue that accumulated under force hold, or cleaning up after a load test.

Sends a test mail through the exact same path as any application mail, including the spool. That is what makes it a real smoke test rather than a transport check.

--attachment (short: -a) attaches a small generated file. Mind that the payload only reaches var/mailqueue/ when delivery fails, or with archive mode on—on a healthy SMTP server the mail just goes out. See Smoke Test for how to verify the file-backed path deliberately.