Weird Problem with MailScanner

[Damian Rivas]

Hi there, I'm having a really weird problem and as I am a n00b it gets a
bit more difficult to find a solution. 
 
I'll explain the details first:
 
Since 6 months ago, I am the System Administrator of a Tourism Agency.
We use an E-mail Scanner in a server with the following characteristics:
 
Processor: Pentium II 233 Mhz.
RAM: 128 MB
OS: Linux Slackware 9
MailScanner version: 4.55.10
 
This E-mail Scanner use the MailScanner with Sophos Antivirus and Spam
Assasin to filter spam and scan incoming and outcoming mails for viruses
which are then redirected to an internal MS Exchange Server or to the
Internet, respectively by sendmail.
 
One month ago, the server started behaving erratically. Instead of
checking and sending mails as it normally did, it started queueing mails
massively and therefore accumulating great quantities of them, it got up
to 10000 mails queued up in a single day, therefore, no one recieved a
single mail. After many pointless attempts to repair this problem and
seeing that the Travel Agents were getting a bit mad, I decided to
redirect the MX server of our domains in the DNS to the firewall, so
that our E-Mail Scanner server didn't recieve more mail, which was only
going to contribute to making the problem worse, more incoming mails,
more queued mails.
 
With this, the server started sending the queued mails and mail traffic
was restored with the difference that mails weren't scanned at all(they
were no longer passing through the MailScanner Server). When the mail
queues were empty again, I tried to reestablish the scanning service,
but the problem appeared again.
 
I don't have a clear idea of what can be causing this problem. The
machine is pretty old, but the former administrator told me that it had
never had problems. I think that perhaps we are being Spam Bombed and
perhaps the System poor processing capabilities cannot resists the
increasing traffic and therefore it gets stuck and keeps enqueueing
mails.
 
Please if anyone can guide me I'll appreciate it,
Sorry if my English is a bit rusty, it is not my native language,
therefore if you need me to be more clear or try to give more details of
something, don't hesitate to ask so.
Thanks in advance!
<http://www.cht.com.ar/> 
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