Exim Problems

This note is a supplement to the virtual domain mail setup. I assume that you are delivering to a Maildir, I have not tried this with other delivery formats.

rejected RCPT

I had problems with receiving log messsages of the form "rejected RCPT someUser@some.domain" with no reason given in the log file. After some searching I found this link https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2011/04/msg00917.html which suggested running, as root:

# exim -d -bh [a-senders-ip-address]

Then wait until it is ready and enter each of the following two lines:

MAIL FROM: bouncing_sender@sender.domain

RCPT TO: your_name@your.domain

Sender gets "550 administratve prohibition

In my case this was caused by exim4.conf having the wrong owner/group. It must be readable only by the mail server, and not world-readable.

The problem, for me, could also be a permissions fight between exim, mailman and apache. They have, to some extent, to share files so getting the permissions right can be quite a fight. Discovering the problem when they go wrong is even worse as there tends to be nothing in the log files to help. The only clue is that running 'exim -d -bh ', as above, says that the message was accepted, but in the end it is still rejected.