Email retries during long email server shutdown

Your fear is valid.

I’m not sure how much time you have to fix this? One solution could be to set up and configure a mail server that accepts emails but just throws them away.

The really quick and (very) dirty way to resolve this is to use redis-cli and issue a flushdb command. That will remove all queued jobs. It will also log out all users. Then reboot your Discourse to make sure all regular jobs run again.