Linux sendmail Administration: Craig Hunt Linux Library

I have been frantically searching for a sendmail book that would just get me through the fundamentals. Much of the internet material are hacks by admins professing to know something, but get you into more trouble. I checked out the bat book (O'Reilly) and get cross-eyed going through that tomb, which seems to be more of a reference than a practical guide. This book finally hit the jackpot. It has excellent explanations. The explanations for basic SMTP, IMAP, POP are very short and sweet, and excellent to get everyone on the same page, before delving into sendmail. The sendmail section is great, and really explained how the get the basic system going and the problems with sendmail for initial setup. Before this book, I was confused by the whole directory structure and m4 system, and this book walked me through it. That alone made this book was so invaluable. Thank you. This book is oriented strictly to Linux. I have to administrater Solaris, so Linux is not in my scope now, but given that Unices are similar that is not a problem. I find that overall this book to be quite practical, and doesn't have needless explanations, just exactly what you need to get a feel and handle on sendmail. I'm sure there are undoubtedly rants here from sendmail hackers that profess to be gurus, which I am sure will neg my review. This review is not for them, but rather for the normal folks that have a life and are eager to learn, but yet need to administer sendmail as well (especially where time to implement this stuff is critical).

Having read another popular sendmail book, made me wonder if I should try again. Sendmail is large complex program and can be very daunting.Craig Hunt's Linux Sendmail Administration turned out to be quite refreshing. I'm no longer satisfied with just setting up the basic sendmail configuration. His easy to understand, easy to follow style had me tinkering at each step along the way. I was looking for a simple how-to guide to get my home office sendmail up and running. Instead I got much more - a very thorough understanding of how and why sendmail works the way it does.Craig has a knack for reducing complex concepts into easily understandable lessons. Doing so, the subject matter is covered in depth, not watered down. Even difficult tasks like the m4 macro processor and rewriting rules are introduced in a straight forward useful manner. An excellent book, I can't wait for my next installment from the Craig Hunt Linux series!

This book is excellent. It starts out with the concepts and architecture of email services and then goes step by step through the installation. Since the installation changed a bit after this book came out I recommend following the directions in the README file after downloading the sendmail tarball off of ftp.sendmail.org. The book then goes into all the gory details of sendmail. I have looked all over the net and have yet to find a begin to end sendmail guide- this is what you want

This book should be read by all unix administrator who touch sendmail recently as it covers all the basic configuration with a lot of examples to explain the sendmail items. You can read this and then the "bat" book so that you will be familiar "Sendmail" a lot.

Based on the TOC, I've been anxiously awaiting this book (so I can figure out a bunch of sendmail problems I have). Well, it's even better than I anticipated! The initial chapters on concepts are clear; the discussion of the .cf is very useful & complete. In the real world env., I suspect this might even supplant the "bat" book! (agree? comments?)