[TriLUG] Hopefully not so easy...

[Jon Carnes]

 --- Original Message: Friday 03 May 2002 11:35 am ---
>
> As a note to anyone... how do people recommend I learn about MTA's?  Any
> good books, should I switch from sendmail for my sanity, Online howtos?

Sendmail gets a bad rep.  The coding is readable - though a bit obscure.  
Still sendmail is one of the most documented services in Unix.

A lot of folks use M4, which to me is less readable than the actual code it 
modifies.

If you want to learn more about MTA's then start monkeying around with what 
you currently have.  Set a goal to get it to do something you want, and then 
make that happen.  Learning by doing.

Another thing to do is trace a message from the moment it enters your machine 
until the moment it leaves your machine.  For me that's much more 
illuminating than learning the configuration options for an MTA.

Finally, there are some nice resources available on www.sendmail.org.  I 
happen to really like Sendmail.

Now, if you want to throughly learn the config/setup/operations of a specific 
MTA, I highly recommend Postfix.  Postfix also has some awesome documentation 
and is a much better model for how services *should* run on a Unix server.  
Beyond being a great model (worthy of immulation), Postfix is also a high 
performance opensource MTA.

Jon