Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent The Mail Transfer Agent

By Philip Hazel
Price: $44.95 USD
£31.95 GBP

Cover | Table of Contents | Colophon

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Colophon

Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animal on the cover of Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent is an aye-aye. The aye-aye is part of the order of primates, and in fact is part of the lemur group. Native to Madagascar, they are considered one of the strangest looking primates, and not very much is known about them. A full-grown adult is about the size of a raccoon. Its features include large round ears, black fur with white spots, a flat nose, and big round eyes. Two very distinctive characteristics of the aye-aye are its incisor teeth, which never stop growing, and its long, spindly fingers, of which the middle finger is the longest. Both of these traits are used as tools in hunting food. The aye-aye lives mostly on bug larvae and fruit; it often uses its teeth to break open dead tree bark, then uses its long middle finger to reach inside and take hold of the bugs.

The aye-aye is completely nocturnal, and lives mostly in trees in the forest. Unfortunately, it is dangerously close to extinction. One reason for this is that its natural habitat, the rain forest, is gradually being destroyed for resources. Due to this loss of its food source, the aye-aye has had to forage for food in other areas, and often steals from local farms. For this reason, it is killed as a pest. Also, in parts of Madagascar, there is a superstition that the aye-aye is a harbinger of bad luck and death; therefore, it is often killed on sight. However, steps are being taken to ensure the safety of the species, such as breeding some in captivity and declaring certain areas of the forest as protected. Mary Brady was the production editor and proofreader and Mark Nigara was the copyeditor for Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent. Jane Ellin and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. Ann Schirmer, Gabe Weiss, and Lucy Muellner provided production assistance. Nancy Crumpton wrote the index.

Ellie Volckhausen designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Erica Corwell produced the cover layout with QuarkXPress 4.1 using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.

David Futato designed the interior layout based on a series design by Nancy Priest. The print version of this book was created by translating the DocBook XML markup of its source files into a set of gtroff macros using a filter developed at O'Reilly & Associates by Norman Walsh. Steve Talbott designed and wrote the underlying macro set on the basis of the GNU troff s macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to XML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff text formatter Version 1.11.1 was used to generate PostScript output. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book; the code font is Constant Willison. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand 9 and Adobe Photoshop 6. This colophon was written by Mary Brady.

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