mail group/exim starting difficulties

[<jbmaxson@surfglobal.net>]

(my apologies if the friggin' webmail doesn't wrap right...)

At some point in the past, the "mail" entry in my /etc/group file was
deleted.  Since then I've had some issues, as you could guess...the
big one being that I can't start exim...I get:


Starting MTA: 2003-08-14 22:33:50 Exim configuration error
  group mail, referred to in line 216, was not found


However, I have manually gone in and added it, as seen here (list
continues for a bit). It doesn't seem to "take":

chewie:/home/jbmaxson# cat /etc/group
mail:*:100:jbmaxson,root
root:*:0:root
games:x:102:
pppusers:*:103:jbmaxson
exim:*:104:jbmaxson

Thus, fetchmail keeps spitting me back an error of:

Aug 14 22:39:14 chewie fetchmail[507]: SMTP connect to localhost
failed
Aug 14 22:39:14 chewie fetchmail[507]: SMTP transaction error while
fetching from mail.surfglobal.net


How can I get exim up and working again?  I think the right question
is, how do I enter the group "mail" in so that exim can find it and
start properly?

Thanks,
Jeff