exim's retry database acting up

I had some downtime on our shell server with the .forward files on it last
night. Those directories are NFS mounted by the mailserver.

When I brought it up again a huge number of messages were waiting in the
queue on the mailserver but they were not delivered. "Retry time not
reached"! Initially the users home directory could not be stat()ed and
thus the message was deferred.

Then the most amazing thing:
New messages coming in where queued instead of being delivered!

I finally had enough of this nonsense and stopped exim and erased the
retry database. On startup exim delivered all messages to their
destination.

What exim needs to do is to deliver ALL messages when the first
.forward file from those homedirectories was successfully read.
There needs to be some easy way to get rid of those retry times.
exim_fixdb was not documented in such a way that would have allowed me to
use it on a huge number of messages.

The way that exim runs the queue made it take a couple of hours to get
through it. Messages are delivered one by one and since the queue also
contained messages to hosts not reachable. There was a significant delay
on those since exim was taking a long time to timeout on those problem
messages.

Could exim timeout within 10 seconds on those slow messages, fork them
into a separate process and continue delivering the rest of the queue
faster?

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