load ans que problem

[Stefaans Mostert]

Hallo all
I use redhat 7.3
MailScanner-4.14-9
Sendmail

Problem is that @ the moment my load is verey high and all my mail is being qued.
Being in an isp enviroment that is just not good ;-)
I seem to have a lot of messages in my mque file.
[root at mailscanner root]# ls /var/spool/mqueue | wc -w
 208086

I think the problem is that sendmail is having trouble stating all the messages and is being kept busy
trying to get them all out
I see that a lot of the messages are from spam sources that I send back and either time out or cannot be delivered.

Question
How can I get rid of say all messages older than three days or have sendmail time out the messages quicker?
I cannot just delete all the messages as some of my users still have messages in the que.

Is there another way of rooting out the offenders?

I really have a serius problem here

Tnx

Stefaans