Email Issues

Recently I've been having an issue with my email server. For whatever reason I now have two processes running at about 49% each. The processes both belong to amavis and are running clamscan.

How this works is that email comes into my server, is picked up by postfix, then delivered to amavis which run spam and virus scanning on it via spamassassin and clamAV, when it is clean, amavis reinserts the email back into the queue and postfix delivers it.

I first noticed this problem after I didn't receive any emails for a day, and then recieved "Mail Returned To Sender" emails in my inbox. After reading the reason outlined in the returned email, I ran top on my server to find out the reason why. Sure enough, that's when I found both amavis processes running at 49%.

Since this is the case, it is really annoying since there are cron jobs that run overnight displaying server status and the like, which are really quite handy. So from here I have a couple of options. One would be to remove amavis, clamAV and postfix and then reinstall them and hope it works, or I could do a complete rebuild of the server.

The rebuild might seem a little extreme, but it's something that I should probably do anyway just to clean up my server. I've got it fairly nailed down as to which services and servers I want and need running, so I would only be installing those specific software packages. The only concern I have is, what happens if this happens again? How do I fix it?

If anyone out there knows how I can fix this problem, please post a comment as my emails are temporarily out of service.