please recommend sendmail references/books

[Roger Beever]

Actually, Don, depending on your circumstances, working your way through
the bat book might be a bit like taking a course in aeronautics when all
you want to do is catch a flight from New York to London.

If you're providing mail services to clients on an internal network,
you'll need a mail server -- sendmail, postfix, qmail, etc. If you're
pretty much a bog standard singleton user with an account at an ISP and
no network to support, you might decide running your own mail server
doesn't offer much in return, apart from the sheer geekiness factor.
(Also, consider what happens when you go out of town and power down the
server.)

Before buying those books, check the support section of Red Hat's site
for howto's on using sMandrake doesn't seem to be able to profit from
its gendmail or postfix with their recent releases. (Just run a search.)
Guidance for RH9, and RH8 I believe, applies without modification to
Fedora.

If you own a domain, have a static IP address, and want your server to
receive all mail addressed to that domain, you'll need to learn a
smidgen or two about DNS, in particular, A records, MX records, and PTR
records.

If you don't own a domain and have a dynamic IP address assignd by your
ISP, you'll need to check out using one of the dynamic DNS services that
allow you to emulate having a static IP.

Either way, you're mail server needs to have a static IP that's
associated with a domain before it can receive your mail. (I suspect
there's some convoluted way around that, but...)

Frankly, if you are a singleton user with a dynamic IP and no domain,
you might simplify your life by using sendmail to route your outgoing
mail to your ISP's mail server (this is called the "smart host" option;
postfix and qmail let you do the same thing) and using fetchmail to pull
your mail from your ISP's mail server. Or use fetchmail and just use
your ISP's mail server for your outgoing mail. That way, you have zero
concerns about being an unsuspecting mail relay.

Actually the combination of own domain and don't have a static IP address
works fine with custom DynDns.
The "bat book" does look a bit daunting I must admit but I bought it as a
spur to getting behind the  Linux GUI as well.
A simple me at mydonain.net set-up should be fairly using the docs that are on
the web.
There is also a sendmail news group where you can ask.
Regards Roger