Configuring virtual domains with Exim

My question concerns the best way to establish mail transport services for virtual domains using Exim4 as my MTA in a Debian 3.1 system. (This is the very first time I have tried to configure a mail server, so please pardon any noobieness. For instance, I've so far only tackled the MTA; I won't deal with the MUA until the MTA is set up.)

I am trying to follow the instructions in Chap 14 of "Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible," and am trying for as much a default installation as possible. It appears that my Debian configuration came with Exim 3.** by default, whereas the Bible addresses only Exim 4. Since the Exim site itself says that level 3 is obsolete, I upgraded to 4 yesterday. So far so good.

Per the Bible, I ran the configuration script as follows:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

… and made the default selections in almost all cases. In particular, to the question:

Other destinations for which mail is accepted:

… I followed the biblical injunction and left it blank. I did so in part because the book at this point promised that in the next section I would learn how to configure virtual domains.

The result was a configuration file which listed only one domain:

li11-226.members.linode.com

But I want to add two other domains which I have registered and which point to the same IP address. I have already set these up as NamedVirtualHosts in Apache, have them set up properly in DNS/BIND, and I can access them properly via either http or ftp. So all that remains is mail configuration.

The Bible describes two ways of doing this. (1) "If you want to edit the configuration file manually, copy /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated to /etc/exim4/exim4.conf, open that file … [and change the specifcation of 'domainlist local_domains' from a single value to a colon-delimited list]."

(2) "To change the list of local domains with debconf, run sudo dpkg-reconfigure exim4-base. Answer the questions as you answered them previously, with the exception of the question titled 'Other destinations for which mail is accepted:'."

Okay, here's my immediate question: I tried doing precisely that, i.e., I called:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure exim4-base

… and entered my password. But instead of switching to the dpkg prompt screens I encountered yesterday when doing my initial configuration of exim4, I got … nothing! The program simply exited without comment! So I got nowhere with respect to setting up virtual domains.

So, can anyone suggest why this happened? And what a better approach to setting up virtual domains would be?

Thanks in advance.

Jim Keenan

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