Review - Qmail Quickstarter: Install, Set Up and Run your own Email Server
I got my copy of "Qmail Quickstarter: Install, Set Up and Run your own Email Server" by Kyle Wheeler. I knew Kyle due to his helpful tips on qmail list and so immediately grabbed the copy and started reading it. I happen to teach qmail to my students and so read it more from a perspective of a teacher than a critic. Being a fast reader, I finished the entire book in few hours.
Who is this book for - This is a very good book for newbies to qmail making them graduate from newbie to intermediate level. This might not be informative reading for people already good in qmail but still worth a read.
Chapter 1 gives a good mention of basic qmail components in a easy language with a good mention of tcpserver and some mention of daemontools, packages which are recommended by the author of qmail, Dan Bernstein, for use with qmail.
Chapter 2 and 3 talks about qmail' queue with some nice discussion about aliases and dot-qmail files. The best part of these chapters for me was an small shell script for POP-before-SMTP sessions. I had a lot of trouble making my students understand the concept after showing them Bruce Guetner' relay-ctrl package and I was too lazy to churn up my own in shell or python, so this example is very much appreciated. But the bad part for these chapters is that Kyle does not explain the much needed /var/qmail/queue structure in detail.
Chapter 4 is a somewhat theoritical chapter which gives details on different type of mailbox formats and how they deal with emails, POP3, IMAP4 servers and webmail. A very nice read especially if you are new to qmail. The part on webmail though lacks depth and could have been written to explain common webmail clients like sqwebmail, horde, squirrelmail etc.
Chapter 5 is an excellent HOWTO on qmail virtual domains. It is one of the best sections in the book.
Chapter 6 talks about filtering but it lacks depth and I was expecting something real nice from Kyle, especially about recommendations of RBLs, greet-delay programs, mailfront and some sample QMAILQUEUE wrappers.
Chapter 7 just gives basic intro to maillist managers, encryption which again could have been expanded a bit more.
Chapter 8 talks nicely about the excellent logging system by Dan and qmailanalog is explained nicely.
Overall as a trainer I give this book 7.5/10. I wanted Kyle to be partial to some packages having clean code like mailfront, vmailmgr so to impress upon newbies the need of clean code. I will certainly recommend this book for people who are not clear with "Life with qmail" or John Levine' qmail.