The Book of Postfix

State-of-the-Art Message Transport

Sendmail is an open source message transport application which is widely used throughout the world and has a part in processing and delivering a majority of the email that traverses the Internet. Sendmail has shown some signs of aging though so Wietse Venema created Postfix to be a faster and more secure message transport system. This book takes a look at what you need to know to deploy and administer a Postfix mail server.

The Book

Sendmail is the "King of the Hill" of the open source mail transport world, but Postfix is gaining steam. Wietse Venema, creator of TCP Wrapper and co-developer of TCT (The Coroner's Toolkit), wrote Postfix to create a faster and more secure mail transport application.

Setting up and maintaining any email server application is no walk in the woods, and for those unfamiliar with the finer points of mail trasport or not comfortable working with Unix / Linux, it can be quite daunting at first.

Hildebrandt and Koetter invest a great deal of knowledge into The Book of Postfix, walking the reader through installation and advanced Postfix administration and configuration such as managing multiple domains, blocking spam and viruses and tuning Postfix for optimal performance. This book provides what you need to know to get from knowing nothing to having a fully functional Postfix server up and running.

My Review

It had been a while since I had done any email server installation or administration and my past experience was primarily with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. I had never actually installed or configured Sendmail, or its formidable competition, Postfix.

From reading different lists and forums, it seems that Postfix has many fans, but there are also many pitfalls one encounters in trying to learn things the hard way and install the application. Using Hildebrandt and Koetter's book, that no longer seems to be a problem. At least, it wasn't for me.

The authors seem to have walked through an installation as they were writing and made note of the various quirks and the more important aspects to make sure they conveyed them clearly. However they did it, the book does an excellent job of walking the reader through a wide variety of scenarios and clearly explaining the best way to get through them.

The security features of Postfix make it an excellent choice for setting up a mail server, and The Book of Postfix will help you get it set up and properly configured in a fraction of the time it would take you without the book.