Exim delivers electronic mail, both local and remote. It has all the virtues of a good postman: it's easy to talk to, reliable, efficient, and eager to accommodate even the most complex special requests. It's the default mail transport agent installed on some Linux systems, runs on many versions of Unix, and is suitable for any TCP/IP network with any combination of hosts and end-user mail software. Exim is growing in popularity because it is open source, scalable, and rich in features such as the following:

• Compatibility with the calling interfaces and options of Sendmail (for which Exim is usually a drop-in replacement)

• Lookups in LDAP servers, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and NIS or NIS+ services

• Support for many kinds of address parsing, including regular expressions that are compatible with Perl 5

• Sophisticated error handling

• Innumerable tuning parameters for improving performance and handling enormous volumes of mail

Best of all, Exim is easy to configure. You never have to deal with ruleset 3 or worry that a misplaced asterisk will cause an inadvertent mail bomb. While a basic configuration is easy to read and can be created quickly, Exim's syntax and behavior do get more subtle as you enter complicated areas like virtual hosting, filtering, and automatic replies. This book is a comprehensive survey that provides quick information for people in a hurry as well as thorough coverage of more advanced material.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 6 Ratings

Very Hard Reading - 2002-08-05
Reviewer Rating:
I'm reluctant to criticize someone as talented as Philip Hazel who produces such a high quality product, distributes it for free and spends so much time supporting it.

However this book and the online documentation he provides is extremely difficult to use. He admits that he didn't want to write this book and hoped someone else would have. Indeed it would have been better if someone else had.

The book contains an exceptional amount of background information on mail protocols and procedures, and a lot of detail on Exim itself. If I had 5 weeks to read and absorb it all it would be wondersful.

For busy systems administrators using this book is a hard work, finding the information needed is slow and then understanding it is difficult. Dr Hazel's writing style is terse and rather like a mathematical text. There is no fluff in it's 600 pages. I find myself reading sentences repeatedly trying to understand them. Also the implications of certain information is not made obvious.

His lack of realistic examples is also a serious short coming. He glosses over remote access of mail via POP, IMAP and SMTP authentication even though this is the most common way of accessing mail these days. I would especially like to see discussion of an ISP type mail server with multiple domains, which is lacking.

Finally, there is lack of reference material in the appendices, a short form listing of command options and configuration options would be a great addition.

Warning: this book is for version 3 and version 4 is now available although version 3 is still used.

Out of date, but still a good starting point - 2003-06-16
Reviewer Rating:
Exim is fairly straightforward for an MTA, though I found I needed to understand a bunch of concepts before I knew what Exim was doing. Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent does an excellent job of covering those concepts, much better than the official documentation, and for that this is essential reading for Exim users. This is the 1st edition, however, and only covers Exim release 3, so many of the important things that you might want to do with Exim that are easy to do in Exim 4 are not covered. You will need the official Exim website to complete your education and get up and running.

You might want to try using just the official documentation from the website and a good sample configuration file before buying this outdated book. (The Debian Linux installation of Exim comes with an excellent, well-commented default configuration.) If you get lost (like I did), buy this book used (like I didn't).

A new edition covering Exim 4 would easily get a 5 star review and earn a permanent spot on my bookshelf. Some quick reference appendicies and tables and an improved index, such as those common to most newer O'Reilly titles, would also be nice.

Good supplement to official documentation - 2003-01-28
Reviewer Rating:
This won't replace the official documentation -- especially since it covers an old outdated version of EXIM -- but covers enough to be worthwhile as a supplement. Still, I was rather disappointed that much of what I was trying to do (such as set up spam filtering) wasn't covered by the book, and that I had to go online and read through back mailing list archives and read official documentation to get the job done. From any other publisher I wouldn't feel too bad about that, but from O'Reilly I expect better.

Good book on a great program... - 2002-08-07
Reviewer Rating:
If you can't (or won't) run sendmail, then IMO your only two real alternatives are postfix and Exim. I still believe that sendmail is a better choice, but both postfix and Exim are still quite good.

If you decide to run Exim, there are few people who could give you a better insight into how the program is configured and how it works internally, than the author of the program -- Phil Hazel.

However, keep in mind that the book is primarily oriented around version 3 of this program, and version 4 (with some significant changes) has already been produced. More information is available at [URL].

M. T. Mig. PE - 2004-12-15
Reviewer Rating:
This book was a disappointment. While first reading the book I thought it was great. However, after I tried actually configuring the exim program I realized this book included only superficial examples. Any serious configuration required an in-depth understanding of the exim program far beyond the overview of this book. The necessary bits of information are scattered throughout the book. Unfortunately, these bit were often not referenced in the Index. This required my reading large sections trying locate a specific bit of information. The book's index is weak. It often includes references to variables, options and features that requires the specific name of the information being sought to locate. In contrast Exim's downloadable pdf documentation has the advantage of being quickly computer searchable. After being frustrated with this book I turned to the downloadable documentation and found it much more useful.

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