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Suspend Queues

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Applies to: Exchange Server 2010

You can suspend a queue that's present on a computer that has the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Hub Transport server role or the Edge Transport server role installed. By suspending a queue, you prevent messages from leaving the queue, but you don't change the status of messages in the queue. Messages that are in delivery through SMTP-send will finish operations. You can suspend a queue to stop mail flow, and then suspend one or more messages in the queue. When you resume the queue, the messages that were suspended won't leave the queue.

You can suspend a queue that has a status of Active or Retry. You can also suspend the Unreachable queue and the Submission queue.

If you suspend the Unreachable queue, items won't be resubmitted to the categorizer when configuration updates are received by the transport server until the queue is resumed. If you suspend the Submission queue, messages won't be picked up by the categorizer until the queue is resumed.

Looking for other management tasks related to managing transport queues? Check out Managing Transport Queues.

Use the EMC to suspend a queue

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need, see the "Queues" entry in the Transport Permissions topic.

  1. In the console tree, click Toolbox.
  2. In the result pane, click Queue Viewer.
  3. In the action pane, click Open Tool.
  4. In Queue Viewer, click the Queues tab. A list of all queues on the server to which you're connected is displayed. You can create a filter to display only queues that meet specific criteria.
  5. Select one or more queues, right-click, and then select Suspend.

Use the Shell to suspend a queue

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need, see the "Queues" entry in the Transport Permissions topic.

To suspend a queue, use the following syntax.

Suspend-Queue -Filter {property -operator "value"}

This example suspends all queues that have a message count equal to or greater than 1,000 and that have a status of Retry.

Suspend-Queue -Filter {MessageCount -ge 1000 -and Status -eq "Retry"}

For detailed syntax and parameter information, see Suspend-Queue.