“The sendmail 8.10 release, now out in beta, makes it clear that
even after two decades, sendmail is still plenty young enough to be
learning new tricks. One of these is sendmail 8.10’s integration
with LDAP, the lightweight directory access protocol. You can think
of LDAP as a specialized database for the kinds of information
(name, address, title, and so on) that a human-resources department
keeps. While the first defining standard for LDAP is almost five
years old now, it’s just in the last year that marketing campaigns
have spread this acronym across the trade magazines. Novell’s
latest redefinition of itself is as the “Directory Company”; the
strongest technical achievement of Microsoft’s Windows 2000 is its
Active Directory; and all of the usual industry heavyweights,
including Cisco, IBM, and AOL, are involved in a tangle of
consortia and “directory strategies.”
“But why should you care about LDAP? And how do you get to a
working system?“