Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent

You can do anything with Sendmail, the saying goes, but why would you want to? The Exim mail-handling daemon is just as capable as the old stalwart of handling everyday electronic mail duties, and far easier to administer. With a style and polish that's typical of the blue-cover series of system administration books from O'Reilly, Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent shows how to set up and use Exim. You'll be very pleased with this book if you've chosen to work with Exim and require better information than the online documentation can provide. Philip Hazel has done a good job of combining a comprehensive set of details--including lots of command listings--with advice and practical examples that will make an administrator's life easier.

Typical of this approach is the treatment of methods for blocking traffic from bad hosts that attempt to mail to your Exim station. The book runs through alternative techniques--using a public blocking list, blocking hosts explicitly, and so on--in series. Each technique is described in terms of what happens and why, and includes listings of the relevant configuration commands. Other sections, such as those concerned with SMTP configuration, are more reference-like. They contain long lists of commands and options, in which the purpose of each is explained. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to set up, configure, and administer the Exim mail-handling agent. Directors, routers, transports, filters, and the integration of Exim with Perl, shell scripts, and database lookups are covered.