Re: exim - what is it? (how does it run)

[bobg.hahc@gmail.com]

On Dec 5, 8:00 pm, "Sergio Cuéllar Valdés" <herrser...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> 2007/12/5, Bob Goldberg <bobg.h...@gmail.com>:
> > What exactly IS exim?
>
> > IOW: when I setup sendmail, I'm working with bash scripts.
>
> > when I setup an exim conf file - what exactly runs it? perl?
>
> Hello,
>
> you should better read a lot =)   and make specific questions if you have.
>
> Best regards,
> Sergio Cuellar
>

Sergio,

I appreciate you taking the time to reply to my post.
For the past 5 days, i've been doing nothing but reading. I find most
of the doc's to be bloated files, with little in the way of practical
information.

At the end of all this research, I STILL find myself trying to
diagnose why my router isn't working; and it's a pretty darn simple
router at that. getting useful error messages out of exim debug is
worthless.

So I thought, if I can run a simulation of whatever exim does, maybe I
could stop in the middle & see just what's going on.

I thought my question was very specific.
What language is the exim conf file written for?
is it perl, or is it an exim-specific language.

ie: the command line [from my router] is:
data = ${lookup{$local_part@$domain}lsearch{/etc/exim4/email-accept}
{:fail: User unknown }}

what interpreter can I execute this line of code in to see what the
heck it's doing?
I can't lookup the proper syntax of the lookup command if I don't know
the language it's based in.

Here is what exim -debug says:
lookup yielded: user@domain.com:  << this IS a valid email, and
lsearch FOUND it. so far so good.
expanded: :fail: User unknown         << WHY does my statement expand
to failure
file is not a filter file                         << what file isn't a
filter file, and what does that really mean?