We found the issue in that someone is sending out massive amounts of a 178KB newsletter, it does not look like spam, but it is beyond acceptable levels becasue of the sheer number of the mails in queue at 178KB in size, if a typical sized mail there would have never been any issue.
Ok, I stopped that delete operation, and the server is back, it was responding so slow when it was deleting it was taking a long time for me to even issue the commands.
However, in that time it deleted 690MB of files as well, so at least something good came out of it.