Cleaning up the mail processes on Linux

Question

I'm running a web server on Cent OS, Linux version 2.6.9. I only wish to use mail to send emails.

However my server has the following processes running:

#processes user process
1 root /usr/bin/perl -wT /usr/sbin/pop-before-smtp --daemon=/var/run/pop-before-smtp.pid
5 dovecot imap-login
150 dovecot pop3-login
5 postfix pickup, smtpd, proxymap, anvil, trivial-rewrite

What can I remove without breaking the mail sending?

Answer 1

You can shutdown pop-before-smtp and dovecot. pop-before-smtp allows people to authorise their SMTP connection by collecting mail first. Dovecot is a pop3/imap server.

service dovecot stop
service pop-before-smtp stop

If you want to permanently disable these services (persistent across reboots)

chkconfig dovecot off
chkconfig pop-before-smtp off

Answer 2

dovecot is an imap server. as root, service dovecot stop and then chkconfig dovecot off.

I have no idea what pop-before-smtp is, but you can stop that service too.

The only thing you need to have running is postfix/smtpd, to deliver mail.