BayswaterFarm.Com
Digital mayhem
Exim
I chose Exim as the MTA for the bayswaterfarm.com server after a serious attempt to come to terms with Sendmail. Mac OS X comes with Sendmail installed as the default MTA and it was not too difficult to tweak it to do simple things such as automatically send me the daily system log. But to use it in anger as the domain's SMTP server I felt I had to at least understand how it worked. So I bought (and read) the book (3lb; pp 1021), read all the relevant ReadMe's and followed the excellent section in Nemeth et al's Unix System Administration handbook. "You've got to be joking!", I concluded. This is a seriously bloated program, built to do one thing in the days when the Internet was populated by people who trusted each other and subsequently layered with modifications in response to each security flaw discovered.
I came across Exim by accident. I fancied that Oxford University Computing Service, being a bunch of Unix gurus, would be using Sendmail, but analysing some mail headers one day I noted that they used Exim, which I had not heard of at that point. The name Exim is, I gather, a truncation of Experimental Internet Mailer; it is written by Philip Hazel at Cambridge University Computing Service, and is designed more or less as a 'drop-in' replacement for Sendmail though it has it's roots more in Smail. Its a much more straightforward program to understand, configure and manage than Sendmail.
Exim is freely available under the GNU Public Licence and can be downloaded from www.exim.org. The documentation is superb, and there is an O'Reilly book by Philip Hazel as well (2lb 1oz; pp 611). (Update: that was for Exim v3. We are now on Exim v4, and there is a book for that too.
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