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 intermidiate 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’s 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’s 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’s qmail. Also, Kyle has a way of explaining concepts well.

Shantanu Kulkarni
www.shantanukulkarni.org