LDAP System Administration

Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs)

The remainder of this chapter discusses LDAP support within several popular MTAs. You can skim this material if you want an overview of various mail servers, or you can focus on the details regarding your specific MTA and skip the others. In either case, I assume that you have some familiarity with the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) and mail servers in general.

Before we begin, Table 7-2 provides a summary of the LDAP versions used by the mail servers presented in this section. The same rule for enabling LDAPv2 binds described in the beginning of this chapter still holds true for two out of the three mail servers listed.

Table 7-2. LDAP versions used by various mail servers

Mail transfer agent	LDAPv2 bind	LDAPv3 bind
Sendmail	✓
Postfix		✓
Exim	✓

Sendmail

Sendmail is the default MTA on most current versions of Unix. A number of alternatives have appeared in the past few years (such as Postfix, Qmail, and Exim), but if you work with Unix or Linux systems, chances are you’ll deal with Sendmail. Sendmail introduced support for retrieving information from an LDAP directory in Version 8.9. However, this support didn’t really stabilize until later versions (this discussion focuses on Version 8.12). It by no means attempts to give comprehensive coverage of Sendmail. For information on the details of configuring and running a Sendmail server, refer to Sendmail, by Bryan Costales and Eric Allman (O’Reilly).

Sendmail’s LDAP integration ...