Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent

Chapter 21. Administering Exim

Once Exim is up and running, there are a few things that must be done regularly to ensure that it keeps on handling your mail the way you want it to. How much regular attention it needs very much depends on the nature of your installation and the volume of mail you are handling.

One thing you might want to do is to watch what Exim is actually in the process of doing or what it has just done. You can check up on Exim processes using the exiwhat utility and you can read the log files directly, or use the Exim monitor to display a rolling main log. A utility script called exigrep provides a packaged way of extracting log entries for messages that match a given pattern.

Log files can become very large; normally they are “cycled” on a regular (often daily) basis so that logs for previous days can be compressed. Some operating systems have standard procedures for cycling log files; for those that do not, a utility script called exicyclog is provided.

In this chapter, we describe Exim’s logging mechanism, the format of the entries that are written when messages are received or delivered, and the options you can use to control what is logged. The available utilities for extracting and displaying log information are also described. After that, the facilities for finding out what Exim processes are doing are covered, including use of the Exim monitor, which is an X11 application for Exim administration. Finally, there is a discussion of the maintenance ...