The third part of this book covers the initial and day-to-day administration of sendmail. Of necessity, such administration must include other thorny issues, such as DNS and security, so we cover those subjects too.

Chapter 21, DNS and sendmail

Shows how sendmail and the Domain Naming System interact, explains how to get them to work together, and offers help in taming the wild MX record.

Chapter 22, Security

Explains why sendmail must run as root, then shows many ways to tighten security so that this will not be a problem.

Chapter 23, The Queue

Shows how the queue is organized, how sendmail protects itself from bad files in the queue, and how to process and print the queue.

Chapter 24, Aliases

Describes the aliases(5) file and the various parts that make it up. Also shows how to write a program to perform delivery, and how to manage and print the aliases database.

Chapter 25, Mailing Lists and ~/.forward

Illustrates the ins and outs of managing mailing lists, shows how to set up a ~/.forward file, and presents solutions to various problems with both. This chapter also describes mailing lists and how to produce and manage them; it concludes with full coverage of the ~/.forward file.

Chapter 26, Logging and Statistics

Explains how to use syslog(3) to log sendmail's activities and how to generate statistics from those logs. Describes the effect of signaling the daemon and the use of the -X command-line switch.