SENDMAIL EXPLAINED

O'Reilly Publishes Comprehensive Guide to Complex Internet Email Program

November 1, 1993 -- SEBASTOPOL, CA -- O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. announces
the publication of sendmail ($32.95 US), the most comprehensive book ever
written about the program that acts like a traffic cop in routing and
delivering electronic mail on UNIX-based networks Authored by Bryan
Costales, with sendmail creator Eric Allman and IDA sendmail authority
Neil Rickert, it is a thorough presentation of this program whose
complexity is both its blessing and its curse.

First developed in the early 1980s by then-student Eric Allman, sendmail
was a solution to difficulties in transferring electronic messages between
dissimilar networks. His program modified messages to conform to
conventions required by the networks, rather than reject them. While some
of the remarkable growth of electronic mail on the Internet can be
attributed to this simple principle, as needs for a wider range of
services has arisen, so too has sendmail's complexity. In fact, Allman
states that the publishing of the book itself prodded new development as
it made him want to make small and large files in the program: "It would
be fair to say that the book and sendmail version 8 fed on each
other--each has improved the presence of the other."

In sendmail, readers will learn:

* Everything needed to know about the syntax of the sendmail.cf file,
including such topics as delivery agent selections, rules and rule sets,
macros, class macros, and database macros, options, and headers.

* How to create sendmail address rewriting rules.

* How to have sendmail insert additional custom message headers.

* How to integrate sendmail and DNS.

* How to use aliases and :include: files for mailing lists.

* How to improve the security of sendmail configuration.

* How to set up multiple queues, including offsite backup queues for
disaster protection of mail handling when a site is down for an extended
time.

* How to control and interpret sendmail debugging output.

* Whether vendor-supplied sendmail, the new Version 8 Berkeley send nail,
or IDA sendmail (a version from Europe that uses a more readable
configuration file) is best for a site. It also covers the standard
versions available on most systems, such as those found on Sun and
DEC/Ultrix workstations.

Sendmail includes a tutorial designed to teach sendmail from the ground up
(a reference section so complete that even Eric Allman uses it) as well as
practical administrative advice.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Bryan Costales is System Manager at the International Computer Science
Institute in Berkeley, California He has been writing articles and books
about computer software for over ten years. His most notable books are C
from A to Z (Prentice Hall) and Unix Communications (Howard Sams).

Eric Allman is the Lead Programmer on the Mammoth Project at the University
of California at Berkeley. This is his second incarnation at Berkeley;
previously, he was the Chief Programmer on the INGRES database management
project. In addition to his assigned tasks, he got involved with the early
UNIX effort at Berkeley. Over the years, he wrote a number of utilities
that appeared with various releases of BSD, including the -me macros,
tset, trek, syslog, vacation, and of course sendmail. Eric spent the years
between the two Berkeley incarnations at Britton Lee (later Sharebase)
doing database user and application interfaces, and at the International
Computer Science Institute, contributing to the Ring Array Processor
project for neural-net-based speech recognition.

Neil Rickert earned his Ph.D. at Yale in Mathematics. He is currently a
professor of computer science at Northern Illinois University. He likes to
keep contact with the practical side of computing, and so spends part of
his time in UNIX system administration. He has been involved with the IDA
sendmail project, and is largely responsible for the current version of
the IDA configuration.

O'REILLY & ASSOCIATES

O'Reilly & Associates is recognized worldwide for its definitive books on
UNIX, The X Window System, and the Internet Working closely with
developers of new technologies, O'Reilly's editors are "computer people"
who use the software they write about. The company's planning and review
cycles link together authors, computer vendors, and technical experts
throughout the industry in a creative collaboration that mirrors the
strengths of the "open systems" philosophy itself.

# # #

sendmail
By Bryan Costales, with Eric Allman & Neil Rickert
830 pages
ISBN: 1-56592-056-2
$32.95 (US)
Toll-free order number: 800/998-9938

Other system administration books published by O'Reilly

TCP/IP Network Administration
By Craig Hunt
502 pages, ISBN: 0-937175-82-X, $29.95 (US)

DNS and BIND
By Cricket Liu & Paul Albitz
418 pages, ISBN: 1-56592-010-4, $29.95 (US)

System Performance Tuning
By Mike Loukides
336 pages, ISBN: 0-937175-60-9, $24.95 (US)

Essential System Administration
By AEleen Frisch
466 pages, ISBN: 0-937175-80-3, $29.95 (US)

O'Reilly & Associates Inc
103 Morris St, Ste A, Sebastopol, CA 95472
800-998-9938,  707-829-0515,  fax 707-829-0104

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