Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent: The Mail Transfer Agent - Softcover

Hazel, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0596000987 ISBN 13: 9780596000981

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, 2001

Synopsis

Exim delivers electronic mail, both local and remote. It has all the virtues of a good postman: it's easy to talk to, reliable, efficient, and eager to accommodate even the most complex special requests. It's the default mail transport agent installed on some Linux systems, runs on many versions of Unix, and is suitable for any TCP/IP network with any combination of hosts and end-user mail software.Exim is growing in popularity because it is open source, scalable, and rich in features such as the following:

• Compatibility with the calling interfaces and options of Sendmail (for which Exim is usually a drop-in replacement)
• Lookups in LDAP servers, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and NIS or NIS+ services
• Support for many kinds of address parsing, including regular expressions that are compatible with Perl 5
• Sophisticated error handling
• Innumerable tuning parameters for improving performance and handling enormous volumes of mail

Best of all, Exim is easy to configure. You never have to deal with ruleset 3 or worry that a misplaced asterisk will cause an inadvertent mail bomb.While a basic configuration is easy to read and can be created quickly, Exim's syntax and behavior do get more subtle as you enter complicated areas like virtual hosting, filtering, and automatic replies. This book is a comprehensive survey that provides quick information for people in a hurry as well as thorough coverage of more advanced material.

About this title

Review

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.

About the Author

Philip Hazel has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, but has spent the last 30 years writing general-purpose software for the Computing Service at the University of Cambridge in England. Since moving from an IBM mainframe to Unix about ten years ago, he has gotten more and more involved with email. Philip started developing Exim in 1995 and is its sole author.

Edition details

• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0596000987
• ISBN 13: 9780596000981
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 632