Who should attend: System administrators who want to learn more about the Sendmail program, particularly details of the configuration file. Programmers implementing new mail front ends who want to know exactly what Sendmail can do for them (this tutorial covers Sendmail, not mail front ends). This will be an intense, fast-paced, full-day tutorial intended for people who have already been exposed to Sendmail.

What you will learn: The latest release of Sendmail version 8.8.

Sendmail is arguably the most successful UNIX-based mail transfer agent in the world today. Originally distributed with the Berkeley Software Distribution, Sendmail is used by most UNIX vendors. After introducing a bit of the philosophy and history, topics will include:

- The syntactic elements of the configuration file: mailers, options, macros, classes, headers, precedences and priorities, trusted users, key file definitions, and rewriting rules and rulesets
- The flow and semantics of rulesets, including hints about debugging
- Introduction to SMTP and how Sendmail operates in an SMTP environment
- Day-to-day management issues: alias and forward files, "special" recipients (files, programs, and include files), mailing lists, command line flags, tuning, and security.
- How Sendmail interacts with the Domain Name System (DNS)
- An introduction to the M4 configuration package included with Sendmail 8.

Eric Allman  was the original author of Sendmail. He was the chief programmer on the INGRES database management project and an early contributor to the UNIX effort at Berkeley. He is on the USENIX Board of Directors and a frequent speaker at USENIX events.

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