Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent [Paperback]

Philip Hazel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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.

Review

'A good book, and one I found I could actually start at the beginning of and read through.' - Andrew Johnson, West Yorkshire Linux User Group 'As this book is written by Exim's author you would expect it to be both authoritative and accurate and it is both of those - there were no glaring errors or omissions in the text. In addition the book is well written and perfectly readable...I have no hesitation in recommending this book to anybody with a need to manage an Exim based mail system of any size.' - Tom Hughes, Cvu, April

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (October 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596000987
• ISBN-13: 978-0596000981
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,116,310 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Very Hard Reading, August 4, 2002

By 

BRETT ROBSON (Tokyo) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent (Paperback)

I'm reluctant to criticize someone as talented as Philip Hazel who produces such a high quality product, distributes it for free and spends so much time supporting it.

However this book and the online documentation he provides is extremely difficult to use. He admits that he didn't want to write this book and hoped someone else would have. Indeed it would have been better if someone else had.

The book contains an exceptional amount of background information on mail protocols and procedures, and a lot of detail on Exim itself. If I had 5 weeks to read and absorb it all it would be wondersful.

For busy systems administrators using this book is a hard work, finding the information needed is slow and then understanding it is difficult. Dr Hazel's writing style is terse and rather like a mathematical text. There is no fluff in it's 600 pages. I find myself reading sentences repeatedly trying to understand them. Also the implications of certain information is not made obvious.

His lack of realistic examples is also a serious short coming. He glosses over remote access of mail via POP, IMAP and SMTP authentication even though this is the most common way of accessing mail these days. I would especially like to see discussion of an ISP type mail server with multiple domains, which is lacking.

Finally, there is lack of reference material in the appendices, a short form listing of command options and configuration options would be a great addition.

Warning: this book is for version 3 and version 4 is now available although version 3 is still used.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Out of date, but still a good starting point, June 16, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent (Paperback)

Exim is fairly straightforward for an MTA, though I found I needed to understand a bunch of concepts before I knew what Exim was doing. Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent does an excellent job of covering those concepts, much better than the official documentation, and for that this is essential reading for Exim users. This is the 1st edition, however, and only covers Exim release 3, so many of the important things that you might want to do with Exim that are easy to do in Exim 4 are not covered. You will need the official Exim website to complete your education and get up and running.

You might want to try using just the official documentation from the website and a good sample configuration file before buying this outdated book. (The Debian Linux installation of Exim comes with an excellent, well-commented default configuration.) If you get lost (like I did), buy this book used (like I didn't).

A new edition covering Exim 4 would easily get a 5 star review and earn a permanent spot on my bookshelf. Some quick reference appendicies and tables and an improved index, such as those common to most newer O'Reilly titles, would also be nice.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good supplement to official documentation, January 27, 2003

By 

E. L. Green (San Jose, CA, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent (Paperback)

This won't replace the official documentation -- especially since it covers an old outdated version of EXIM -- but covers enough to be worthwhile as a supplement. Still, I was rather disappointed that much of what I was trying to do (such as set up spam filtering) wasn't covered by the book, and that I had to go online and read through back mailing list archives and read official documentation to get the job done. From any other publisher I wouldn't feel too bad about that, but from O'Reilly I expect better.