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If anyone else has read the "bat book" they'll appreciate this one; anyone who enjoyed it can stop reading this now.

sendmail's flexibility makes it a wonderful tool when it works right. Getting it there can be serious hike in the manuals. The m4 configuration system made things a whole lot better, but the number of options can easily be confusing.

Instead of trying to describe sendmail's capabilities, Craig Hunt starts with what you want it to do and how to get there.

The "recepies" begin with a situation: you want to have all the mail sent through a server, management wants the sales people immune from spam filtering, LDAP is the company standard for user ID's. Each situation is followed by a short description of how to get there using the m4 configuration options. After the quick-and-dirty portion is a pratical discussion of what the configuration section does, more-or-less how it works, and (best of all) how to test it.

The whole book is arranged this way into a series of vingettes, each group getting further into the details of how sendmail is set up. Early chapters deal with how to configure and install sendmail, what the basic files are for, and simple tests. Further in are issues of masquerading, envelope manglement, relaying, forwarding, and delivery. Towards the end are security and dealing with long-ish queues in heavily loaded systems.

Examples later in the book use earlier ones as a base. This shortens the later ones to relavant sections. By explicitly listing the earlier ones, Hunt makes the process of referring back to them painless. There are also plenty of good references into the bat book and sendmail doc's.

The book uses the current (8.9.12) sendmail for its examples. As an expirament I grabbed this from sendmail.org and installed it on a client and server. The client fowrards all of the non-local mail to a "smart host", the server masquerades all of the mail comming in to the domain. Afer going through the configuration examples, strange to say, it all worked: the updates updated, the deletes they deleted, the inquires inquired and the closings completed... er, sorry...

The detailed sections are useful even if you are not going to configure sendmail any time soon. The tests shown are nice, specific, useful examples for general troubleshooting. The are specific to the recipies, and the recipies progress through stages of complexity. This makes the examples a nice sequence for looking at how to test various sendmail issues -- from telnet through 'sendmail -bt'.

The recipes and examples would also make a good general introduction to mail handling. Going through the cases and tests makes a good introduction to the care and feeding of sendmail.

The style is also readable. Hunt includes some humor, realistic descriptions of the instanities mail admin's go through, and descriptive prose to keep the text moving. The cookbook won't replace Dashiel Hammett on your nightstand, but does a good job in handling a pretty dry subject.

Dry, that is, until the mail doesn't get through. At which point you'll probably be happy to have read the book.