Home ›

The Book of Postfix by Ralf Hildebrandt and Patrick Koetter

Issue 138

From Issue #138
October 2005

Aug 26, 2005  By Don Marti
 in
Book review.

No Starch Press, 2005

ISBN 1-59327-001-1

$44.95 US

Anyone who has tried to run an e-mail server knows that mail isn't a polite relay race any more. It's a game of smash-mouth football. Nine out of ten times someone opens an SMTP connection to you, it's not with something you want. And as if coping with spammers, viruses and other people's misconfigured mail software wasn't enough, now e-mail is a mission-critical company IT service and is expected to plug in to the LDAP directory. We can't blame you if you decide to outsource mail entirely.

If you do decide to stay on as postmaster@ and fight it out, whatever you do, don't try it with one of last decade's mail books. Although any of the current mail servers, correctly configured, can put up a good fight against the spammers and other bad people, The Book of Postfix by itself is a good reason to make Postfix your mail server of choice. Look here for a good explanation of the SMTP protocol, essential for any mail admin, along with enough detail on the architecture of Postfix to help you really understand the config files. It also offers real-world advice for putting together a mail server setup that is reliable in the face of the spam and virus blitz.

Postfix offers you a lot of choice in where to add filters, sanity checks and other protective countermeasures to your mail server. For example, do you want to set up a content_filter or an smtpd_proxy_filter? Besides offering a cookbook for each solution, The Book of Postfix helps you consider the pros and cons of each feature you're considering. A helpful plus is diagrams illustrating where exactly countermeasures fit into the Postfix architecture.

Postfix is complicated enough on its own, as it divides functionality among multiple processes for security. In order to add spam-fighting tools and have everything work, you need a good understanding of what plugs in to what and how, and this book is a great way to get it.

Downloadable scripts and errata, some of which could save you a late night of troubleshooting, are available at www.postfix-book.com.

______________________

White Paper
More Resources
Fabric-Based Computing Enables Optimized Hyperscale Data Centers

Today’s modular x86 servers are compute-centric, designed as a least common denominator to support a wide range of IT workloads. Those generic, virtualized IT workloads have much different resource optimization requirements than hyperscale and cloud applications. They have resulted in a “one size fits all” enterprise IT architecture that is not optimized for a specific set of IT workloads, and especially not emerging hyperscale workloads, such as web applications, big data, and object storage. In this report, you will learn how shifting the focus from traditional compute-centric IT architectures to an innovative disaggregated fabric-based architecture can optimize and scale your data center.

Learn More

Sponsored by AMD

White Paper
More Resources
Red Hat White Paper: Using an Open Source Framework to Catch the Bad Guy

Built-in forensics, incident response, and security with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Every security policy provides guidance and requirements for ensuring adequate protection of information and data, as well as high-level technical and administrative security requirements for a system in a given environment. Traditionally, providing security for a system focuses on the confidentiality of the information on it. However, protecting the data integrity and system and data availability is just as important. For example, when processing United States intelligence information, there are three attributes that require protection: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Learn more about catching the bad guy in this free white paper.

Learn More

Sponsored by DLT Solutions