Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>> Greg Smith wrote:
>>>>> Hi, I am not a Linux person but I am now setting up my first
>>>>> server. The main reason I am doing this is to run a mail server. Can
>>>>> anybody point me to a URL/book that will help a novice setup and
>>>>> maintain one?
>>>> I'd recommend using Postfix, and picking up the O'Reilly book on it.
>>> Thanks for your response.
>>>
>>> My primary usage is for relay mail. Does Postfix handle that well?
>>>
>>>
>> If all you need is a relay, sendmail can be fairly simple. IIRC the
>> O'Reilly sendmail book has such a config file in it.
>>
>>
>> In the past, I have scrapped any default sendmail config files and
>> written a minimalist one from scratch, for relays.
>
> Sendmail config formats are viciously complex. Since the m4 macros were
> created to have a "sendmail.mc" file get parsed into the actual working
> sendmail.cf and sendmail.fc for frozen configurations, it's gotten much
> easier to edit a sendmail.mc to do what you want in legible fashion. The
> O'Reilly book is fabulous if you need to do anything complex or slightly
> non-standard, but I find Postfix much more managable with its currently very
> good integration of procmail, milters, integration for Mailman and
> Spamassassin, easy Maildir support, etc., etc., etc.
>
> The sendmail published with many UNIX distributions is so old and out of
> date that it's simply not worth using on a server, and I've often found it
> easier to get my managers or clients to do a complete shift to Postfix
> rather than permit an update to a non-distribution of sendmail to gain the
> desired performance or features. Don't get me started on doing this for
> Suns, it's off-topic here, but I suspect the same problem has occurred for
> Debian users with "stable" rather than "testing" versions of sendmail.
>
>
Ah well, you are talking to someone who write his own version of
sendmail.cf in order to use an entirely table driven sendmail.

Its no worse than any other arcane programming language. Its certainly
easier than getting my VCR to record what I want when I want :-)