Introduction

sendmail is the most powerful and widely used Unix email software in the world today. Millions of Unix systems are currently running sendmail. Yet this common tool is a source of confusion for many system administrators, most of whom dread sendmail configuration. This dread has a very rational basis: complexity and lack of familiarity . sendmail configuration languages are as complex as any other programming languages, and, unlike many other languages, sendmail configuration languages are used infrequently. sendmail is configured when it is installed or upgraded; otherwise , an administrator has little interaction with the sendmail configuration. The average system administrator simply does not get enough practice to truly master the sendmail configuration languages.

For me, and a great many other techies, cooking a decent meal also falls into the category of something that I do not often practice. On my own, a Coke and a Snickers constitutes dinner, while beer and pretzels is a party. When it is my turn to cook for others, particularly to cook an elaborate meal, I need help. I don't have time to learn how to cook on my own; I need someone to tell me exactly how it is done. Luckily, cookbooks are created for exactly this situation.

A cookbook provides recipes for a wide variety of situations. The recipes are step-by-step solutions to specific problems. In the kitchen, the problems are how to properly prepare specific dishes. On a sendmail server, the problems are how to configure the system to handle specific situations; for example, how to configure sendmail to relay mail for your clients without creating an open relay that will be abused by spammers.

As the name sendmail Cookbook implies, this is a cookbook full of recipes for proper sendmail configuration. A sendmail recipe outlines a configuration problem, presents the configuration code that solves that problem, and then explains the code in detail. The discussions of the code are critical because they provide the insight you need to tweak the code enough to make it right for your server.

The key feature of this book is that it saves you time. Time is something that most system administrators have in very short supply. When you have a specific sendmail configuration problem, looking up a step-by-step solution is much quicker than researching the problem and developing your own custom solution. This book provides quick solutions for many common sendmail configuration problems.

The sendmail Cookbook uses the same Problem/Solution/Discussion format used in all O'Reilly cookbooks. As an example of this format, the following section, which explains how this book should be used, is laid out using the recipe format.



Sendmail Cookbook
sendmail Cookbook
ISBN: 0596004710
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 178
Authors: Craig Hunt

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