Re: Gnus with Exim

["Steven E. Harris" <seh@panix.com>]

David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com> writes:

> I installed Cygwin's Exim on my machine.  However, I'm not sure how
> to get Gnus to use it or how to set it up to send mail
> asynchronously, so any hints would be much appreciated.

I can help you with this.

Do you send all your outgoing messages through a "smart host" --
meaning your ISP's SMTP server -- or can you send mail by connecting
directly to your recipient's SMTP server? The former is a more typical
configuration for dial-up and most broadband accounts.

Somewhere in your Gnus configuration, you should set the variable
`sendmail-program' to "exim", because even though exim can impersonate
sendmail, no such symlink is set up in Cygwin by default. (Debian
Linux does provide such a symlink, so calling "sendmail" works just
fine, with exim acting in its place.)

Have you changed the variable `message-send-mail-function' from its
default? To send mail through your local MTA you'll want the value to
be message-send-mail-with-sendmail.

Much of the difficulty I've had with exim on Cygwin relates to getting
the permission on /etc/exim.conf straight. At least as several months
ago, the file /etc/exim.conf must be owned by the SYSTEM account and
not be writable by anyone else. That makes trial-and-error editing of
the file a little frustrating. My bash history would accumulate
alternating entries like:

  $ F=/etc/exim.conf; chown seh.Users $F && chmod u+w $F
  # Edit...
  $ F=/etc/exim.conf; chown SYSTEM.Administrators $F && chmod a-w $F
  # Try it again...


If you don't need to exchange mail locally on your computer among
different users, the setup is really quite simple.

Have you tried running "exim-config"? You can read the script at
/usr/bin/exim-config. I just noticed that it will offer to set up the
sendmail symlink I mentioned above. It doesn't appear to set up the
routers and transports that you'll need to tweak for your particular
situation.

Let me know what you need help on next.

-- 
Steven E. Harris