I have been using qmail for many years and put a lot of effort in keeping my Qmail Howto up to date. I haven’t been making many changes to the guide, since qmail is one of those things that once installed, you can leave it running until the mail server is ready to be decommissioned. So, I go back and update the guide whenever I need to install qmail on a brand new server.
Anyway, I was recently approached by Packt Publishing and they requested me to review their newly released book titled “Qmail Quickstarter” by Kyle Wheeler. I received the book in mail within a week or two after I agreed to review it and decided to check it out over the weekend – here is a very short review of the book.
Despite the fact that qmail is the second most popular MTA on the Internet, there are not that many good books on qmail out there. So, it was exciting to review an addition to the short list of qmail literature. In about 130 pages, the author covers everything from compiling and installing qmail to important patches, qmail configuration and monitoring. The book is easy to read for those who are familiar with *nix, so it is definitely a good reference for mail administrators. There is plenty of information on qmail and third party addons (including vpopmail and VMailMgr) and the author does a good job in explaining basic qmail functionality. However, I felt that the book was a little incomplete, because many topics are touched upon, but not in enough detail. For example, in Chapter 6 “Filtering”, the author mentions the most popular anti-virus engines, but does not show how to hook any of them up to qmail. In all honesty, it is a little misleading to call it a “step-by-step” guide, because it is not detailed enough to be called that. Personally, I would rename it to something like “Qmail Reference Guide”. At the same time, I also understand that putting too many details into such book would make it hard to read and follow, especially with qmail, since it is NOT a simple or intuitive program to learn.
Overall, I really enjoyed reading the book and I can say that it definitely deserves a spot in a system administrator’s bookshelf.
About Nasim Mansurov
