Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I must thank Greg Shapiro and Claus Assmann who, in addition to maintaining the sendmail code and answering questions on the various sendmail mailing lists, also read every single chapter three times so that virtually no mistakes would make it into publication.

Bruce Mah and Sean Brennan were guinea pigs for the first and second editions, respectively. Chris Fedde was guinea pig for the third edition. They set up and ran sendmail based on early drafts and thereby uncovered omissions and mistakes that required correction. Gavin Cameron bravely applied the checkcompat( ) examples to real-world situations, thereby helping to debug that code for me. Mark D. Roth kindly reviewed the ph database type and provided valuable clarification.

Needless to say, this book would not have been possible if Eric Allman had not written sendmail in the first place. Every draft has passed through his hands, and he has spent many hours ensuring technical correctness, providing valuable insight, and suggesting interesting solutions to sendmail problems.

For the 2nd edition, Cricket Liu kindly reviewed Chapter 9, and found several errors that slipped by everyone else.

George Jansen, editor extraordinaire, has turned all my early drafts of new text into a form suitable for publication. He has stuck with me from the first through this draft and has never tired.

Thanks and praise must go to Tim O'Reilly for agreeing to do this book in the first place. His experience has shaped this book into its current form. He was aware of the "big picture" throughout and kept his fingers on the pulse of the reader. Without his advice, a book this complex and massive would have been impossible.

Additional thanks must go to Lenny Muellner and Mike Sierra for tuning troff macros to satisfy the needs of this somewhat unique manuscript, and to Edie Freedman for gracefully accepting my unhappiness with so many cover designs except the current one, which I consider perfect.

The production folks at O'Reilly & Associates did a yeoman's job of achieving an outstanding finished book. For the previous editions a special thank you to Barbara Willette for copyediting, Nancy Kotary for help with final production, Kismet McDonough-Chan for her help in each phase of the production, Chris Reilley for the figures, Mary Anne Weeks Mayo for helping with quality control, Curt Degenhart, Madeleine Newell, and Ellie Fountain Maden for making the edits, Seth Maislin for doing the index, and Danny Marcus for proofreading.

For the 3rd edition, a special thank you to Robert J. Denn for managing the project, Darren Kelly for help with final production, Rob Romano and Jessamyn Read for the figures, Mary Brady, Linley Dolby, Matt Hutchinson, and Claire Cloutier for helping with quality control, Reg Aubry, Julie Hawks, Genevieve d'Entremont, and Judy Hoer for providing production support, Brenda Miller for updating the index from the second edition, and Audrey Doyle for proofreading.

Finally, thanks to a list of folks, each of whom helped in small but notable ways: Paul Vixie; Niel Rickert; Keith Johnson; Paul Pomes; Frederick Avolio; John Halleck; John Beck; Brad Knowles; Andrew Chang; Shau-Ping Lo; and to the many who sent interesting questions to the sendmail-questions@sendmail.org mailing list, and all the postings to the comp.mail.sendmail news group.