Re: exim

[Christoph Groth <cgroth@gmx.net>]

Hi Marcelo,

Please note that I am not a network expert, so what I write might be
wrong.

> with the help of people in this list finally I have a
> exim+fetchmail+mutt configuration working.

Does the multiple SMTP-server configuration work?

> The problem is that after dialing to my ISP and invoking fetchmail
> at the prompt, it reports the number of emails in the ISP box, but
> can't fetch them. I have to type "exim -bd" as root for fetchmail
> retrieve the messages.  Is this normal?

This is strange indeed.  inetd, which should be launched at startup
(/etc/rc2.d/S20inetd), should run exim whenever a connection on its
socket (25) is found (check out the inetd and inetd.conf manpages).
AFAIK everything should be configured correctly by default.

Have a look at your /etc/inetd.conf, here is the MAIL-part of mine:

#:MAIL: Mail, news and uucp services.
smtp            stream  tcp     nowait  mail    /usr/sbin/exim exim -bs
nntp            stream  tcp     nowait  news    /usr/sbin/tcpd  /usr/sbin/leafnode

You might try if sending mail locally works by sending a message to
your own user account (just type `mail your-user-name', enter some
subject, the message body and finish it off by pressing Ctrl-D)

You could check out the logfiles, especially /var/log/exim/mainlog

Perhaps running inetd in debugging mode (-d) could yield some hints?


Sorry, I cannot be any more helpful,

Christoph