Queue control?

[G. Armour Van Horn]

Some unspeakable person flooded Hotmail with spam that looked like it 
came from me overnight, and I'm struggling under the onslaught of error 
messages. Hotmail is pumping the messages in, and as long as the load 
average is under 12 the system is accepting them, but for the most part 
they're just piling up and not being delivered to the local user.

Earlier this afternoon there were so many files in mqueue.in that I 
couldn't run ls to see how bad it was. I renamed the directory and 
created a new one, and not it has over 12,000 files in it, which must 
mean there are over 6,000 more messages waiting to be processed.

I don't really want to read them all, but I do want to get them 
processed so I can read the valid mail that is certainly hidden in there.

I tried bumping the Max children from the default up to 20 to see if 
that would force it to start delivering the mail, but that when my load 
average hit 16 I stopped MailScanner. (I did "service MailScanner stop" 
at a load average of just under 16, it didn't actually stop until the 
load average had hit 25.) Obviously that wasn't the right approach, so 
now I've set it down to 3 children which is keeping the memory use and 
load average within reason, but it still isn't delivering any mail.

Is there something I can do to force the system to devote at least some 
resources to working through the queue instead of just piling it higher?

Van


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