Hello
I'm rather new to linux and i'm enjoying to explore how linux is working. When i was checking the running processes with "ps -A", I could understand for most of the processes what they are doing. But there is two processes I can't understand what they're running for.

It's the processes "master" and "pickup" .

They are located in the "/usr/lib/postfix" directory. So it seems that they have something to do with postfix . master is opening a lot of connections to a lot of i-nodes.

If i run "netstat -p" it gives me the following print:
unix 2 [ ] DGRAM 3336 1837/pickup
unix 3 [ ] STREAM CONNECTED 3125 1819/master
unix 3 [ ] STREAM CONNECTED 3124 1819/master
unix 3 [ ] STREAM CONNECTED 3121 1819/master
unix 3 [ ] STREAM CONNECTED 3120 1819/master
(... about a dozen i-nodes more...)
unix 3 [ ] STREAM CONNECTED 2813 1819/master
unix 2 [ ] DGRAM 2795 1819/master

find / -inum 3336 -print leads to:
/mnt/D/Sound/eJay/Hardtrance/Loop/DRUMLOOP042_HARDT_140_X_SC4.wav
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/luIS10-ISO8859-13.pcf.gz
and then :
/proc/2233/fd: No such file or directory

find -inum 3124 -print gives:
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/helvR08-ISO8859-10.pcf.gz
and then again:
/proc/2233/fd: No such file or directory

To me, this doesn't make any sense. Does anybody here know what these processes are doing?
I also cant find any script in the /etc/init.d/rc[1-5].d directories that would start the pickup and master process

I do know now that pickup and master are started by the start-skripts (using SuSE 8.2) and that "master" does start the "pickup"-process. But why is it connected to a file on my windows harddisk wich is meant to be a simple sound file (mnt/D/Sound/eJay/Hardtrance/Loop/DRUMLOOP042_HARDT_140_X_SC4.wav) ?

Another question: although i can download my mails in mozilla even if master and pickup have been killed, do i need postfix to run at all?

postfix is a smtp program, used for outbound emailing

And most likely the reason its attached to a sound file could be for some sound note for completing a task.. im not extremly familar with suse..

If i kill the master and the pickup process, mozilla still sends my email correctly. Does this mean, that mozilla is using some other program to send mail via smtp?

Thanx for the hint with the sound note. Altough the /mnt/D/Sound-Ditectory contains my own sounds (created by myself) this seems not to be the reason. If I delete the sound files that are connected to master (or move them), it simply catches some other files from my sound directory. Altough this is my work, i don't want to share this files in any way...
Does anybody know, how postfix can be configured or how I could trace back the reason for these Connections?

try running in console mode, and see if postfix still attaches itself to your sound files..

I'm mozilla more than likely is using some other smtp server.. if your closing those servers and it continues to send email no problem.

You can test.. by attempting to telnet into your machine on port 25.. and if you get a connection still, the daemon is still running.

I'm not sure about debugging postfix thou