Skip to content
Rob Morrison edited this page Feb 13, 2020 · 3 revisions

Exim 4 Packages on Debian

This page contains pointers to documentation available for the Debian exim4 packages. Debian has "official" exim 4 packages, and exim 4 is Debian's default MTA. The configuration scheme that is used by the Debian exim 4 packages by default is quite different from what you might expect.

  • Debian exim 4 users mailing list
  • Debian exim 4 wiki page.
  • There is /usr/share/doc/exim4-base/README.Debian on your system (in text and/or html form depending on your package version), giving a short introduction to the specialities of the Debian exim 4 packages. This documentation also includes information about how to get rid of the elaborate configuration scheme if you want to configure your exim in a more conservative way.
  • The README is also available on the web.
  • The packages contain Debian-specific man pages, which are also available on the web._
  • The web copies of README and man pages are generated daily from the latest development version of the exim4 packages, so they might have been improved when compared to the documentation from your package, but the information contained might not match the behavior of your package.

Please try to determine whether you have an issue with exim itself or with Debian's packaging and do not ask Debian specific questions on exim-users. If in doubt, ask on pkg-exim4-users_. People will point you towards exim-users if you have a problem with the exim 4 upstream.

Note carefully that the package name for the current version is exim4 -- if you install the exim package, you will get Exim version 3. This is required to cleanly support upgrades from older versions of Debian GNU/Linux.

Debian offers two flavours of the exim4 Daemon: exim4-daemon-light is a very basic exim which has the basic features and TLS encryption, while exim4-daemon-heavy has most advanced features like LDAP, MySQL and PostgreSQL, SPA SMTP authentication, an embedded Perl interpreter and exiscan-acl.

The Debian exim4 packages use a debconf-driven configuration scheme which might look strange to the experienced exim user.

Clone this wiki locally