Remove Unsent Database Email from SQL Server

19 Mar 2024

Intermediate

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4 min read

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How to Remove Unsent Database Email from SQL Server?

Suppose, you are sending mail to different users by using a while loop and you forgot to insert a while loop update statement. In this case, SQL Server will generate thousands or millions of emails against a specific email address within a minute.

To stop the SQL Server from sending unwanted mail we are required to clean the unsent mail from the database mail queue. We can do this by running the below queries.


SELECT * FROM msdb.dbo.sysmail_event_log;
-- To get number of unsent emails
select count(*) from msdb.dbo.sysmail_unsentitems;
-- remove all the unsent emails
delete from msdb.dbo.sysmail_unsentitems;

Read More: Basics of SQL Commands

Explanation of the Code

Retrieving Unsents Email Messages:
```
SELECT * FROM msdb.dbo.sysmail_event_log;
```
This query retrieves information about email events from the sysmail_event_log table. It can be useful for monitoring the status of email operations.
```
select count(*) from msdb.dbo.sysmail_unsentitems;
```
This query calculates the number of unsent email messages in the sysmail_unsentitems table.
Removing Unsents Email Messages:
```
delete from msdb.dbo.sysmail_unsentitems;
```
This statement deletes all unsent email messages from the sysmail_unsentitems table, effectively clearing the email queue.

All the unexpected emails have been removed from the SQL Server database mail queue.

Summary

In this article I tried to explain how you can remove unsent emails from the database mail queue. If you want to gain a practical understanding, you can enroll in our SQL Server Course.

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