Postfix

Without requiring its administrators to understand the complexities that are characteristic of Sendmail, Postfix offers electronic mail services reliably and with considerable configurability. The program is pretty easy to set up and get going, so it's possible for Postfix, Richard Blum's commendable book about the mail server, to do a good job of explaining installation and have room left over for lots of advanced hints and tricks. This book will serve well on the bookshelf of anyone who's decided to base mail services on Postfix. It also makes a good read for those weighing, in advance of deployment, the relative merits of multiple Unix mail programs.

Most administrators will appreciate Blum's attention to detail--it's rare for him to mention a process or procedure and not also present a listing or example as an illustration of what he's talking about. Sections on the messages that go back and forth during Post Office Protocol (POP) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) sessions are informative, and listings of configuration files clarify what you have to do to get the functionality you want. Some administrators may find a few sections to be written at a level too basic for someone installing Postfix, but at the end of the day, most readers will agree that it's better to assume too little in a technical book than to assume too much. --David Wall

Topics covered: Installing and configuring Postfix, adjusting it to deal with peculiar local circumstances, and getting it to interact with other pieces of Unix software without sacrificing reliability or security. Particularly interesting sections have to do with migrating from Sendmail to Postfix, integrating OpenLDAP with Postfix, and tying Postfix to databases.