Question : Getting Deferred: local mailer (/usr/bin/procmail) exited with EX_TEMPFAIL error

long story short, i've got a redhat enterprise server running sendmail (with mailscanner/spamassassin/clamav/mailwatch) and its been fine and happy for several months and pushes out something to the tune of 20,000 messages a day but coming back from the holiday's, i noticed about 450 messages logged in the outbound queue (where mailscanner puts its emails after its scanned them for viruses/spam).  they all have the same error and subject line but different sizes.  here is a copy of my mailwatch log:

     11/29/04 00:22:27   Postmaster notify: see transcript for details Deferred: local mailer (/usr/bin/procmail) exited with EX_TEMPFAIL 18.1Kb 488 00:05:20
     11/29/04 00:24:39   Postmaster notify: see transcript for details Deferred: local mailer (/usr/bin/procmail) exited with EX_TEMPFAIL 9.1Kb 491 00:05:11
     11/29/04 00:25:36   Postmaster notify: see transcript for details Deferred: local mailer (/usr/bin/procmail) exited with EX_TEMPFAIL 5.2Kb 492 00:05:11
     11/29/04 00:26:09   Postmaster notify: see transcript for details Deferred: local mailer (/usr/bin/procmail) exited with EX_TEMPFAIL   20.2Kb 488 00:05:20



they look like NDR's but why are they stuck and what is causing this?  its also making hte server load go a little high so the delivery of emails is slowing down and i'd like to get it resolved as quickly as possible.  Any ideas?

Oh, also, this box is not hosting anything itself.  its a relay only server so it passes all of its mail to other mail servers. no one is POPing off of it.

Answer : Getting Deferred: local mailer (/usr/bin/procmail) exited with EX_TEMPFAIL error

The Postmaster inbox size is probably the cause of the failure of procmail since it is in the 2Gb range. What I'd do at this point is to 'cp /dev/null /var/spool/mail/root' (assuming postmaster is aliased to root to clean out the inbox. If it is the size, as I suspect, that should solve the problem. Then make sure that someone reads root's mail frequently and keeps the inbox cleaned out.