Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent

Rating:
Summary: Out of date, but still a good starting point
Review: Exim is fairly straightforward for an MTA, though I found I needed to understand a bunch of concepts before I knew what Exim was doing. Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent does an excellent job of covering those concepts, much better than the official documentation, and for that this is essential reading for Exim users. This is the 1st edition, however, and only covers Exim release 3, so many of the important things that you might want to do with Exim that are easy to do in Exim 4 are not covered. You will need the official Exim website to complete your education and get up and running.

You might want to try using just the official documentation from the website and a good sample configuration file before buying this outdated book. (The Debian Linux installation of Exim comes with an excellent, well-commented default configuration.) If you get lost (like I did), buy this book used (like I didn't).

A new edition covering Exim 4 would easily get a 5 star review and earn a permanent spot on my bookshelf. Some quick reference appendicies and tables and an improved index, such as those common to most newer O'Reilly titles, would also be nice.

Rating:
Summary: Very Hard Reading
Review: I'm reluctant to criticize someone as talented as Philip Hazel who produces such a high quality product, distributes it for free and spends so much time supporting it.

However this book and the online documentation he provides is extremely difficult to use. He admits that he didn't want to write this book and hoped someone else would have. Indeed it would have been better if someone else had.

The book contains an exceptional amount of background information on mail protocols and procedures, and a lot of detail on Exim itself. If I had 5 weeks to read and absorb it all it would be wondersful.

For busy systems administrators using this book is a hard work, finding the information needed is slow and then understanding it is difficult. Dr Hazel's writing style is terse and rather like a mathematical text. There is no fluff in it's 600 pages. I find myself reading sentences repeatedly trying to understand them. Also the implications of certain information is not made obvious.

His lack of realistic examples is also a serious short coming. He glosses over remote access of mail via POP, IMAP and SMTP authentication even though this is the most common way of accessing mail these days. I would especially like to see discussion of an ISP type mail server with multiple domains, which is lacking.

Finally, there is lack of reference material in the appendices, a short form listing of command options and configuration options would be a great addition.

Warning: this book is for version 3 and version 4 is now available although version 3 is still used.

Rating:
Summary: Good book on a great program...
Review: If you can't (or won't) run sendmail, then IMO your only two real alternatives are postfix and Exim. I still believe that sendmail is a better choice, but both postfix and Exim are still quite good.

If you decide to run Exim, there are few people who could give you a better insight into how the program is configured and how it works internally, than the author of the program -- Phil Hazel.

However, keep in mind that the book is primarily oriented around version 3 of this program, and version 4 (with some significant changes) has already been produced. More information is available at [URL].

Rating:
Summary: Good book on a great program...
Review: If you can't (or won't) run sendmail, then IMO your only two real alternatives are postfix and Exim. I still believe that sendmail is a better choice, but both postfix and Exim are still quite good.

If you decide to run Exim, there are few people who could give you a better insight into how the program is configured and how it works internally, than the author of the program -- Phil Hazel.

However, keep in mind that the book is primarily oriented around version 3 of this program, and version 4 (with some significant changes) has already been produced. More information is available at [URL].

Rating:
Summary: M. T. Mig. PE
Review: This book was a disappointment. While first reading the book I thought it was great. However, after I tried actually configuring the exim program I realized this book included only superficial examples. Any serious configuration required an in-depth understanding of the exim program far beyond the overview of this book. The necessary bits of information are scattered throughout the book. Unfortunately, these bit were often not referenced in the Index. This required my reading large sections trying locate a specific bit of information. The book's index is weak. It often includes references to variables, options and features that requires the specific name of the information being sought to locate. In contrast Exim's downloadable pdf documentation has the advantage of being quickly computer searchable. After being frustrated with this book I turned to the downloadable documentation and found it much more useful.

Rating:
Summary: Good supplement to official documentation
Review: This won't replace the official documentation -- especially since it covers an old outdated version of EXIM -- but covers enough to be worthwhile as a supplement. Still, I was rather disappointed that much of what I was trying to do (such as set up spam filtering) wasn't covered by the book, and that I had to go online and read through back mailing list archives and read official documentation to get the job done. From any other publisher I wouldn't feel too bad about that, but from O'Reilly I expect better.

Rating:
Summary: The only MTA book you'll ever need
Review: _Exim, the MTA_ would be an appropriate book for someone who does not know anything about e-mail and suddenly needs to manage a server, and EXIM would be a good e-mail server for this person to use. EXIM is the default MTA in Debian and other Unix distributions too.

Exim, the MTA, has been written entirely, except for contributed patches, by Philip Hazel, who continues to maintain it. [...]

In conclusion, if I wasn't already in the habit of setting up qmail on new machines that appear within my aegis, a habit that, once I got the hang of it, has reduced the care and feeding of my e-mail servers to an absolute minimum, I might select exim as an MTA to specialize in. To restate, it's too late for me, but save yourself!

Rating:
Summary: The only MTA book you'll ever need
Review: _Exim, the MTA_ would be an appropriate book for someone who does not know anything about e-mail and suddenly needs to manage a server, and EXIM would be a good e-mail server for this person to use. EXIM is the default MTA in Debian and other Unix distributions too.

Exim, the MTA, has been written entirely, except for contributed patches, by Philip Hazel, who continues to maintain it. [...]

In conclusion, if I wasn't already in the habit of setting up qmail on new machines that appear within my aegis, a habit that, once I got the hang of it, has reduced the care and feeding of my e-mail servers to an absolute minimum, I might select exim as an MTA to specialize in. To restate, it's too late for me, but save yourself!