Exim on The Gnu Pit

Upgrading to Debian 13 Trixie

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 07:12:15 -0500

Ah, the trials and tribulations of upgrading Debian 12 Bookworm to Debian 13 Trixie! I learned a valuable lesson this weekend with the update - always read the apt listchanges email. Always.

The upgrade itself went smoothly with no errors during the packages upgrading/installing. I run three main services on my server - nginx, exim, and dovecot. On reboot, all three had issues with the upgraded packages.

nginx

I received the following error in my nginx error.log:

Let's Encypt SSL Certificates with Exim, Dovecot & NGINX

Fri, 19 May 2017 14:32:24 -0500

I ran into two issues when setting up Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates on two of my servers - permission issues for Exim and the certbot cron job supplied by the package doesn’t handle the renew very well for nginx, exim or dovecot.

Resolving Exim’s Permission Problems

1. Create a new group. I named it sslcerts. Add the exim user to that group. If you’re not using Debian, adjust the user in the command below.

Possible Android Botnet and Yahoo! Mail

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 21:43:24 -0500

I’ve read a number of articles over the past few days about the possible Android botnet and Yahoo! mail. No consensus yet but that’s not necessary to stop the spam at the server level, at least in my case. Of the spam I received so far, these characteristics stand out:

Only one of my mail accounts is receiving the spam. It’s not an account that usually receives spam. My long-time mail addresses that seem to have made it to most of the spam lists don’t get this spam. Makes me wonder where they picked up this address from.