README.md
This directory contains material pertaining to the Exim mail transport agent.

Exim is a mail transport agent (MTA) developed at the University of
Cambridge for use on Unix and Unix-like systems connected to the Internet. It
runs under all of the common flavours of Unix and GNU/Linux. It is freely
available under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence.

In February 2002, a major new version called Exim 4 was released. At this time,
Exim 3 was still widely used, but was no longer being developed. Files that are
part of Exim 3 are in the subdirectory called "exim3", and those that are part
of Exim 4 are in "exim4".

The current distribution of Exim 4 is the file

exim4/exim-n.nn.tar.gz gzipped tar file

where "n.nn" is the version number (e.g. "4.00"). A bzipped copy is also
provided. The distribution contains documentation in ASCII. Other documentation
formats are available in

exim4/exim-html-n.nn.tar.gz HTML
exim4/exim-pdf-n.nn.tar.gz PDF
exim4/exim-postscript-n.nn.tar.gz PostScript
exim4/exim-texinfo-n.nn.tar.gz TexInfo

and the equivalent bzipped files. These compressed tar files contain only the
doc directory, not the full distribution. The HTML tarball also contains a
snapshot of the FAQ. Patches to upgrade from one version of Exim to another may
be supplied, with names of the form

exim4/exim-patch-n.nn-m.mm.gz

Such patches should always be applied as follows:

. unzip the patch file
. cd to a directory which contains the exim-n.nn directory
. run "patch -p0 <exim-patch-n.nn-m.mm"

*After* the patches have been applied, rename the exim-n.nn source directory as
exim-m.mm.

The files exim4/FAQ.txt.gz and exim4/FAQ-html.tar.gz contain FAQ material in
plain ASCII and HTML formats, while exim4/config.samples.tar.gz is a directory
of sample configurations.

The exim4/Contrib subdirectory contains supporting files that have been
contributed to the Exim community by Exim users.

Distributions contained in the Testing subdirectory are intermediate versions
of Exim, usually with un-updated documentation, for specific testing purposes.
The people who are supposed to be doing the testing know who they are.

Philip Hazel <ph10@cus.cam.ac.uk>
February 2002