We have a Project Gamera server on which the number of messages in preprocess has suddenly started growing yesterday and has now grown to over 40K messages in about 30 hours. Usually it doesn't go over 1K. According to /var/log/maillog mail is being processed, so qmail seems to be working.

I have stopped qmail using 'svc-stop qmail', but even 30 minutes after that there are still lots of qmail-smtpd processes active and the number of qmail-smtpd processes goes both down and *up*. Is qmail-smtpd controlled separately? How could these processes be spawned?

Any suggestions?

I just found that qmail-smtpd is indeed controlled separately. I ran 'svc-stop smtpd' and 'svc-start qmail'. Hopefully this will give the server some room to clear up the mess.

That worked just fine.

Just a lot of volume huh?

I hope this will give the server some room to clear up the mess. Thank you for inform.