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Qmail Book

(last edit: 2018-07-11)

The German publisher Markt&Technik (a subdivision of Pearson Education) had asked me, to write a book about Qmail. At that time, Richard Blum's Runnig qmail and Dave Sill's The qmail Handbook was already on the market.

According to my notion, any new book should not only have the advantage to be in someone's mother language, but in addition carrying something new. My plans were covering Qmail but also to discuss UCSPI, Daemontools, and DJBDNS in some detail as well.

In April 2003, the publisher canceled the project due to economical reasons.

I shall continue the project and put the material (in german language) chapterwise as PDF documents online. BTW: The PDF documents are searchable now!

"Power networking with Qmail&Co"

  1. Introduction
    The first chapter introduces Dan Bernstein, his software developments, and his fights against patents. I discuss in some detail the situation of free software, copyright, software licenses, and software patents. Further, I explain the difference between the German/French and the Anglo/American laws w.r.t. those topics.
  2. Unix
    The second chapter is intended to give an introduction into Unix. I shall discuss the Unix OS w.r.t. the "super daemons" and particular system administrator tasks.
    This chapter is to be done.
  3. Networking
    Here, I will give an qualified reference to SMTP and DNS. Though Dan has written some excellent documents about E-Mail, I will additionally pinpoint some practible problems.
    If you read O'Reilly's sendmail or DNS and BIND don't think you understand SMTP and/or DNS. Here, they talk about a specific implementation of those.
    This chapter is to be done.
  4. UCSPI
    In this chapter I give a compact and (except RBLSMTP) complete coverage of Dan's Unix Client Server Program Interface.
  5. Daemontools
    Chapter five provides a deep-inside knowledge of the Daemontools programs, including start-up, customization, and usage. In particular, multilog is well explained. In addition, Gerrit Pape provides a list of services with customized run scripts ready for Daemontools.
  6. Qmail (I)
    This basic chapter introduces Qmail - with all it's aspects. The complete architecture of Qmail is discussed.
  7. Qmail (II)
    Qmail as gateway, spam and virus control, as well as user- and domain-management, administration, and other issues will be discussed in this chapter, which is about using and runnig Qmail in particular for larger E-Mail sites.
    Though originally planned to cover just 50 pages, already section 7.2 (Suppression of Spam E-Mails) and section 7.3 (Virii and Worms in E-Mails) span 70 pages!
    These parts are ready for download .
  8. DJBDNS
    I will introduce Dan's DJBDNS programs in that chapter. I'm still not sure, what will be the scope.
    This chapter is to be done.
  9. Putting it all together
    This chapter aims to summerize our efforts as outlined in the previous chapters.
    This chapter is to be done.