• FreeBSD
• EximBasicInstall

Replacing the default Sendmail install on FreeBSD with Exim is very easy using the ports system.

• This document is written based on the exim 4.60 port. It could be out of date as the port changes over time.

  The following assumes you have /usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade installed and that you are using penv to persist port compile options between builds.

Exim can be built with my optional extras, defined in the environment during build time, if you set these once using penv you won't need to worry about them again. The table below lists some of the most used ones.

# cd /usr/ports/mail/exim
# penv -c mkdir
# penv -S WITHOUT_IPV6=1
# penv -S WITHOUT_PERL=1

The above lines will store my exim preferences outside of the ports tree using penv, once that is done portinstall will set the environment variables before compiling.

# portinstall exim

Once exim is built and installed there are a few manual configurations that needs to be done, first you need to configure the sendmail wrapper to call exim instead of sendmail, edit /etc/mail/mailer.conf to look as below.

• From time to time new options get added here, don't just verbatim take the below, edit your mailer.conf and replace all calls to sendmail with ones to exim.

sendmail        /usr/local/sbin/exim
send-mail       /usr/local/sbin/exim
mailq           /usr/local/sbin/exim
newaliases      /usr/local/sbin/exim
hoststat        /usr/local/sbin/exim
purgestat       /usr/local/sbin/exim

The daily scripts will call sendmail with a few times, this needs to be disabled in /etc/periodic.conf

daily_clean_hoststat_enable="NO"
daily_status_include_submit_mailq="NO"

Exim log files will need to be rotated, add the following to /etc/newsyslog.conf

/var/log/exim/mainlog   mailnull:mail 640 7 * @T00 ZN
/var/log/exim/rejectlog mailnull:mail 640 7 * @T00 ZN

By default exim will listen on all interfaces and IP addresses bound on the machine, if this machine is a host with jails on it you need to restrict it to the host IP address only, edit /usr/local/etc/exim/configure and add the following, replacing aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd with your IP address:

local_interfaces = aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd

To ensure sendmail does not start up place the following in /etc/rc.conf:

sendmail_enable="NONE"

Starting exim at boot time requires settings to be added to /etc/rc.conf, if you want to run a daemon listening on port 25 only add the following:

exim_enable="YES"

If instead you only want to be able to send mails, like the daily ones from cron, you still need to start exim but only in queue runner mode, add the following to /etc/rc.conf

exim_enable="YES"
exim_flags="-q30m"

Exim will by default refuse to deliver mail as the root user, which means mail to the root user will end up not being delivered, you have to set a alias entry to point mail at a real user, edit /etc/aliases:

root:   me@my.domain

Finally you can manually start exim, on the next boot it will start on it's own:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/exim.sh start

Next Steps

With the basic install you will probably want to investigate setting up virtual users and some other features, I've written general guidelines for doing a few things in Exim:

Other interesting tutorials and links about Exim configurations:

Changelog