<p>Speaking about MTA specific behavior:  <code>exim4 -bpc</code> simply prints the number of messages in the queue, and is <em>much</em> more efficient than printing the message details by <code>mailq</code> (which is <code>exim4 -bp</code>) for just counting them. This can make a difference between a timeout and proper report when you have thousands of messages in the queue.</p>

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