Organization of the Book

After a short overview chapter, this book continues with a general introduction to Internet email, because this is a subject that does not seem to be well covered elsewhere. The rest of the book is devoted to explaining how Exim works, and how you can use its configuration to control what it does. Here is a detailed breakdown of the chapters:

Chapter 1

This chapter is a short "executive" summary.

Chapter 2

This chapter is a general introduction to the way email is handled on Internet systems.

Chapter 3

This chapter contains a general overview of the way Exim works, and introduces you to the way it is configured, in particular in regard to the way messages are delivered.

Chapter 4

This chapter continues with more overview material, mostly about topics other than the delivery of messages.

Chapter 5

In this chapter, we return to the subject of message delivery, and show how the configuration can be extended to support additional functionality.

Chapter 6

This is the first of a sequence of chapters that cover Exim's directors, routers, and transports and their options in detail.

Chapter 7

This chapter covers the directors, which are the components of Exim that determine how local addresses are handled.

Chapter 8

This chapter describes the routers, which are the components of Exim that determine how remote addresses are handled.

Chapter 9

This chapter discusses the transports, which are the components of Exim that actually transport messages.

Chapter 10

This chapter describes the filtering language that is used both by users' filter files and the system filter.

Chapter 11

This chapter describes the various different kinds of Exim processes, and the data that they share.

Chapter 12

This chapter is concerned with temporary delivery errors, and how Exim handles them.

Chapter 13

Up to this point, the bulk of the book is concerned with delivering messages. This chapter describes the facilities that are available for controlling incoming messages.

Chapter 14

This chapter covers the facilities for rewriting addresses in messages as they pass through Exim.

Chapter 15

This chapter covers a number of topics that are concerned with the transmission and reception of messages using SMTP.

Chapter 16

This is the first of three chapters that go into detail about the three main facilities that provide flexibility in Exim's configuration. They are all introduced in earlier chapters, but full details begin here.

Chapter 17

This chapter gives all the details about Exim's string expansion mechanism.

Chapter 18

This chapter provides all the details about the three kinds of lists that can appear in Exim configurations.

Chapter 19

This chapter collects a number of items that do not fit naturally into the other chapters, but are too small to warrant individual chapters of their own.

Chapter 20

This chapter gives details of the options and arguments that are used to control what a call to Exim actually does.

Chapter 21

This chapter discusses a number of topics concerned with administration, and describes the utility programs that are available to help with this, including the Exim monitor, which is an application for displaying information about Exim's activities in an X window.

Chapter 22

This chapter describes how to build and install Exim from the source distribution.

Appendix A

This appendix is a summary of string expansion items.

Appendix B

This appendix is a full reference description of the regular expressions that are supported by Exim.