I’ve been stumbling across a few reviews of my book! Here they are:
I liked many parts of the book: firstly, the diagrams dividing down the underlying responsibilities in a crisp no nonsense approach as exampled by the queuing diagram on page 39. Secondly, the book is not verbose and does what it has to do with no extra embellishments. For a busy system administrator the book is thus more viable than a 500-page manual. Thirdly, I enjoyed the discussion of the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and also DomainKeys contained within the pages 93-97. Finally, the mentioning of Silly Qmail Syndrome (page 132) and a patch solution should for some of you short cut a degree of pain and potential embarrassment.
qmail is a great email system. It’s been around forever — the latest stable version is almost 10 years old. I considered The qmail Handbook to be the only quality book on qmail available. However, it’s now going to have to share the spotlight with the release of Qmail Quickstarter.
As mentioned before, the latest qmail release is almost 10 years old. A lot has happened with email administration since then — for instance with security and filtering. Not only has the qmail community adapted to these changes, but they’re also all covered in Qmail Quickstarter. This book also does a great job at describing the unique architecture to qmail. qmail takes the age-old Unix approach of using small programs to do one thing well. Each of the pieces that make up qmail are explained and illustrated here.
Though I haven’t used qmail in years, I’m glad to see that it hasn’t fallen behind in the world of email servers. On the contrary, it’s alive and well and this book does a great job showing that off. I give it a 10/10.
There are others… one was submitted to slashdot but appears to have been rejected (I may post it in its entirety later; the author sent me a copy).
