This versatile well-illustrated book is detailed enough to take the place of a reference text. The book begins by guiding you through the building and installation of Sendmail and its companion programs, such as Vacation and Makemap. These additional programs are pivotal to Sendmail's daily operation. Then you cover the day-to-day administration of Sendmail. This section includes two entirely new chapters, 'Performance Tuning' to help you make mail delivery as efficient as possible and 'Handling Spam' to deal with Sendmail's rich anti-spam features. The next section of the book tackles the Sendmail configuration file and debugging. Finally, the book concludes with five appendices that provide more detail about Sendmail than you may ever need.

The text has kept pace with all of the evolving versions of the software (up to the 8.12 edition). A whole chapter on Spam and Anti-Spam has been added to this latest edition. Other new additions include an elaborated chapter on Performance Tuning; as well as expanded coverage of Vacation and Makemap. Every new option regarding the software (version 8.10 through 8.12) is included. Yet the simplistic and accessible outlook of the book remains. This is a good text to own, although some of the very detailed sections are unnecessary. It is organised and well written. This guide is an excellent update from the 2nd edition and useful to anyone who administers a Sendmail server, including STMP authors.