I recently discovered that our server was taking between 2-3 minutes to load, and for a Cloud VPS that is extremely slow, upon investigating this issue I discovered that sendmail-mta was running as a system service, so you may be thinking well whys that a problem exactly, well a couple of weekends ago we removed both sendmail and postfix from our setup or least we thought we had, it would seem that using:

• sudo apt-get remove sendmail
• sudo apt-get remove postfix

does not actually remove everything from your Ubuntu VPS setup, in fact it actually causes Ubuntu to boot up slowly as some services are still running and of course can’t locate all the necessary files therefor causing a delay.

After looking on the Ubuntu site we soon found out that sendmail-bin also needs removing, so we used:

• sudo apt-get remove sendmail-bin

This however still left some files on our server we did not want, so we had to perform a purge which we used the following:

• sudo apt-get purge postfix exim4 sendmail sendmail-bin

A reboot is required after this, so we did a quick sudo reboot and voila, the box booted within 30secs including the apache2 service, and upon investigating we no longer had the sendmail-mta service loaded!

Removing Sendmail and Postfix

I thought I’d include a quick overall summary how to remove both postfix and sendmail services from Ubuntu without our story and jargon between.

To remove Postfix and Sendmail simply do the following commands:

• sudo apt-get remove sendmail sendmail-bin postfix
• sudo apt-get purge postfix exim4 sendmail sendmail-bin
• sudo reboot