If Your Mail Doesn’t Get Through

A number of features are available for troubleshooting installation problems. The first place to check is Exim’s log files. On Linux systems they are normally kept in /var/log/exim/log and are named exim_mainlog, exim_rejectlog, and exim_paniclog. On other operating systems, they are often kept in /var/spool/exim/log. You can find out where the log files are by running the command: 

exim -bP log_file_path

The main log lists all transactions, the reject log contains details of messages that were rejected for policy reasons, and the panic log is for messages related to configuration errors and the like.

Typical entries in the main log are shown below. Each entry in the log itself is a single line of text, starting with a date and time. They have been split into several lines here in order to fit them on the page: 

2000-01-30 15:46:37 12EwYe-0004WO-00 <= jack@vstout.vbrew.com 
  H=vstout.vbrew.com [192.168.131.111] U=exim P=esmtp S=32100 
  id=38690D72.286F@vstout.vbrew.com
2000-01-30 15:46:37 12EwYe-0004WO-00 => jill <jill@vbrew.com> 
  D=localuser T=local_delivery
2000-01-30 15:46:37 12EwYe-0004WO-00 Completed

These entries show that a message from jack@vstout.vbrew.com to jill@vbrew.com was successfully delivered to a mailbox on the local host. Message arrivals are flagged with <=, and deliveries with =>.

There are two kinds of delivery errors: permanent and temporary. A permanent delivery error is recorded in a log entry like this, flagged with "**“: 

2000-01-30 ...

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