Introduction to Sendmail+IDA

It's been said that you aren't a real Unix system administrator until you've edited a sendmail.cf file. It's also been said that you're crazy if you've attempted to do so twice:-)

Sendmail is an incredibly powerful program. It's also incredibly difficult to learn and understand for most people. Any program whose definitive reference (Sendmail, published by O'Reilly and Associates) is 792 pages long quite justifiably scares most people off.

Sendmail+IDA is different. It removes the need to edit the always cryptic sendmail.cf file and allows the administrator to define the site-specific routing and addressing configuration through relatively easy to understand support files called tables. Switching to sendmail+IDA can save you many hours of work and stress.

Compared to the other major mail transport agents, there is probably nothing that can't be done faster and simpler with sendmail+IDA. Typical things that are needed to run a normal UUCP or Internet site become simple to accomplish. Configurations that normally are extremely difficult are simple to create and maintain.

At this writing, the current version of sendmail5.67b+IDA1.5 is available via anonymous FTP from vixen.cso.uiuc.edu. It compiles without any patching required under .

All the configuration files required to get sendmail+IDA sources to compile, install, and run under are included in newspak-2.2.tar.gz which is available via anonymous FTP on sunsite.unc.edu in the directory /pub/Linux/system/Mail.