[ale] fetchmail + spamassassin warning

[Jason Day]

Due to the storm last night, I shut down all my computers for the night.
This morning, when I powered them back on, my firewall became almost
totally unresponsive after about 5 minutes.  I was able to run top, and
after nearly a full minute it came up, showing a load average of around
48, and 15+ spamassassin processes running.  Turns out that I had close
to 50 emails waiting for me at my ISP.  Since fetchmail was configured
to use the smtp port to deliver the mail, each message was delivered in
parallel, resulting in a separate spamassassin process for each message.
A few minutes later and it became totally unresponsive, not echoing
keystrokes or even forwarding IP packets.

I decided to leave it alone and see what would happen.  After about an
hour, it finally recovered and resumed normal operations.  Not a single
message was lost.  I'd like to see how a windows server would have
managed under similar conditions!  (Actually, no, I don't, I *know* how
it would have managed -- crash and burn.)

Anyway, besides nice'ing the spamassassin process, is there anything
else I can do to make sure I don't DoS my firewall by getting too much
email?  I'm using exim for MTA.

Jason
-- 
Jason Day                                       jasonday at
http://jasonday.home.att.net                    worldnet dot att dot net
 
"Of course I'm paranoid, everyone is trying to kill me."
    -- Weyoun-6, Star Trek: Deep Space 9
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