Cron job working but emails stuck in queue

My cron job appears to be working

--2015-01-14 16:30:01--  http://www.mydomain.co.uk/index.php?option=com_easysocial

Resolving http://www.mydomain.co.uk... 99.999.99.999

Connecting to http://www.mydomain.co.uk|99.999.99.999|:80... connected.

HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK

Length: unspecified [text/html]

Saving to: “/dev/null”



     0K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  255M

    50K .......... .......... .........                         210M=0s



2015-01-14 16:30:04 (237 MB/s) - “/dev/null” saved [80908]

Cron job

/usr/bin/wget -O /dev/null http://www.mydomain.co.uk/index.php?option=com_easysocial&cron=true&phrase=mypassword

But I still have a queue of emails sat waiting according to the dashboard. What exactly does "publish" do ? And any suggestions as to why they are there ? How can I get them moved ?