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Let Exim listen on different SMTP port

I’m using Exim4 as MTA on my mail server. So far so good. Because I use a very good Spam fighting tool (more on this later) I need to run Exim on a different port. Simple thing? That’s what I thought too.

I’m using Exim4 as MTA on my mail server. So far so good. Because I use a very good Spam fighting tool (more on this later) I need to run Exim on a different port. Simple thing? That’s what I thought too.

This was one of these experiences with Linux where you have zillions of options to configure, fragmented and awkward structured documentation, etc. Again, it’s a simple thing you want to do.

The first thing was that Exim uses two way to generate a configuration file at start-up. Either is collects a bunch of single files from a configuration directory and combines them into one configuration file, or it uses one configuration template file and generates the final configuration file from this. What option to use is configured through an other configuration file: The configuration configuration file (called “update-exim4.conf.conf” on Debian).

Why make things that complicated? Anyway...

The problem is, that none of the basic configuration files include the option to switch Exim to listen on an other port. You can find a lot of pretty special and advanced setup stuff in the configuration files but not such a simple thing.

Ok, here it is:

To change the listening port of Exim use: daemon_smtp_port = 1234

It’s pretty simple if you know it. But finding out how to do it is not...
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