Too many files crashing services

[Robert Fitzpatrick]

I posted this issue yesterday sometime and have been trying to track 
down the problem with the help of the Postfix list. There, Weitse has 
suggested tracking down the culprit using lsof, which I know nothing 
about. I tried 'lsof|less', but that doesn't even show anything via SSH, 
related to the mail system. Perhaps I need to be at the console to run 
this? I tried 'lsof|grep postfix' and get pages of information to open 
files, but what I'm I looking for? The problem is these errors below 
keep showing up in the messages log until it starts to crash services, I 
stop and start Postfix and it goes away, but only for several minutes. I 
have to stop and start Postfix every 15 minutes to keep the issue at 
bay. Any ideas what I should be looking for with lsof?

esmtp# tail /var/log/messages
Dec  4 17:54:33 esmtp master[91678]: service pop3 pid 15695 in READY 
state: terminated abnormally
Dec  4 17:54:33 esmtp master[91678]: service pop3 pid 15696 in READY 
state: terminated abnormally
Dec  4 17:54:33 esmtp master[91678]: service pop3 pid 15697 in READY 
state: terminated abnormally
Dec  4 17:54:34 esmtp kernel: kern.maxfiles limit exceeded by uid 88, 
please see tuning(7).
Dec  4 17:54:39 esmtp last message repeated 5 times
Dec  4 17:54:43 esmtp master[91678]: service pop3 pid 15698 in READY 
state: terminated abnormally

I also get these messages:

Dec  4 18:02:57 esmtp postfix/smtpd[15794]: fatal: socket: Too many open 
files
Dec  4 18:05:13 esmtp postfix/smtpd[15760]: fatal: socket: Too many open 
files

--
Robert