[exim] NFS soft mounts?

Hi all,

We currently mount our mail store and spools via hard NFS mounts and
recently had a problem with connectivity to our filer. This caused the
load on the mail servers to very quickly spiral out of control as all
the exim processes hung. We could not get access to the box remotely
and when we finally got access via the console the servers were unusable
and had to be power-cycled.

I was wondering - if we changed our NFS mounts to be 'soft' mounts,
would this help in this scenario? And, are there any implications of
changing the mail stores and spools from hard NFS mounts to soft NFS
mounts... Will Exim gracefully handle the returned errors if the NFS
mounts become unavailable?

Rgds,
Ray