Sendmail painfully slow on Ubuntu

At the office I'm running ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).  My machine always took quite some time to boot, mainly due to sendmail trying to do stuff I couldn't care less about.  I just get my morning coffee and by the time I return (the Senseo machine takes equally long to heat, even if the water is already warm :-( ) my machine has booted.   For the few times that I actually need to use sendmail, it takes about a minute to process a mail.  But now I needed to develop and test a new module that would automatically send a mail each time an update/insert was performed.  This made testing very slow, obviously.   So I took some time to google.  A lot of rubbish and very unclear "solutions".  But finally, the gem:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-networking-3/sendmail-problems-after-i-changed-the-name-of-my-linux-box-61719/

Basically, step one is to determine the hostname of your machine:

open up a terminal and type

hostname

This will reveal your hostname.

Let's say it's "vannessa"

Then step two: open up your /etc/hosts file

sudo gedit /etc/hosts

Modify the first line so it reads

127.0.0.1    localhost localhost.localdomain vannessa

(replace "vannessa" with the hostname of your machine, obviously)

That's all it takes.

The next problem I had was that I got no mails at all. So I had a look at the the error logs (found at /var/log/mail.err and /var/log/mail.info). There were lots of messages like this:

May 11 12:09:04 vannessa sm-msp-queue[15550]: n4B7M876008922: to=root, ctladdr=root (0/0), delay=02:46:56, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=1200805, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1]
When I tried ssh 127.0.0.1 25 indeed, I got a connection refused
When I tried ssh 10.0.0.107 25 (my IP on the office network), I got a connection.  So basically the smtp server wasn't listening on 127.0.0.1 anymore.

I tried a lot of different things, so I don't know what really did the trick.  Things I tried:

- modify /etc/mail/submit.mc: checked/changed the line
FEATURE(`msp', `[127.0.0.1]', `MSA')dnl
- modify /etc/mail/sendmail.mc: checked/changed the following two lines:

DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Family=inet,  Name=MTA-v4, Port=smtp, Addr=127.0.0.1')dnl
DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Family=inet,  Name=MSP-v4, Port=submission, Addr=127.0.0.1')dnl

checked my /etc/hosts file to comment out
#10.0.0.107    vannessa localhost.localdomain vannessa
and replace it with
127.0.0.1    vannessa localhost.localdomain vannessa
instead

One creates a lot of garbage while trying to fix things. and this garbage may create more problems...

Finally I issued a

sudo sendmailconfig

and answered Y to all questions to rebuild/reload sendmail configuration.