exim4 opening to many threads

["Benedict Verheyen" <linux4bene@pandora.be>]

Hi,

i have exim4 running and today the people from the cable company
came over and installed a cable phone. For the installation they shut
down the moment for an hour and forgot to plug in the network
cable into the moment. When i came home, i saw that my connection
was gone, plugged the cable back in and my server started to fetch
mail. Since it had been a couple of hours since the mail was fetched,
a lot of mail came in. My server started over 50 exim4's and the server
chokes on it since there are only a couple of amavis and spamd threads
running.
How can i limit the number of threads that exim opens at a time?
Ideal would be for example if you could specify to only have 10 
running exim threads at a time so the system doesn't choke when
receiving lots of mail.
Is this possible?

Thanks,
Benedict