Skip to Content
Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent
book

Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent

by Philip Hazel
July 2001
Intermediate to advanced
640 pages
18h 9m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent

Chapter 1. Introduction

Exim is a mail transfer agent (MTA) that can be run as an alternative to Sendmail on Unix systems.[1] Exim is open-source software that is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and it runs on all the most popular flavors of Unix and many more besides. A number of Unix distributions now include Exim as their default MTA.

I wrote Exim for use on medium-sized servers with permanent Internet connections in a university environment, but it is now used in a wide variety of different situations, from single-user machines on dial-up connections to clusters of servers supporting millions of customers at some large ISP sites. The code is small (between 500 KB and 1.2 MB on most hardware, depending on the compiler and which optional modules are included), and its performance scales well.

The job of a mail transfer agent is to receive messages from different sources and to deliver them to their destinations, potentially in a number of different ways. Exim can accept messages from remote hosts using SMTP[2] over TCP/IP, and as well as from local processes. It handles local deliveries to mailbox files or to pipes attached to commands, as well as remote SMTP deliveries to other hosts. Exim consists of support for the new IPv6 protocol in its TCP/IP functions, as well as for the current IPv4 protocol. It does not directly support UUCP, though it can be interfaced to other software that does, provided that UUCP “bang path” addressing is not required, because ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

qmail

qmail

John Levine
What Successful Project Managers Do

What Successful Project Managers Do

W. Scott Cameron, Jeffrey S. Russell, Edward J. Hoffman, Alexander Laufer
Workforce Ecosystem Orchestration: A Strategic Framework

Workforce Ecosystem Orchestration: A Strategic Framework

Elizabeth J. Altman, David Kiron, Robin Jones, Susan Cantrell, Steven Hatfield

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596000987Errata Page