Your message dated Sat, 24 Oct 2026 17:02:38 +0200 with message-id <[email protected]> and subject line Re: Bug#1151751: exim4: Allow installing alongside another MTA has caused the Debian Bug report #1151751, regarding exim4: Allow installing alongside another MTA to be marked as done.
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--- Begin Message ---Package: exim4 Version: 4.100.1-4 Severity: normal Hi, TL;DR: Does exim4-config really need to conflict with other MTA's? I would like to install a lightweight one alongside exim4, to get a setuid-less sendmail that talks to exim4 via STMP. For some background: I'm currently running exim4 as the main MTA on a webserver. Due to a security measure configured by default in the Apache mtm-itk module, my PHP scripts cannot use setuid binaries, which means that sending mail from PHP fails with something like: unable to set gid=1001 or uid=0 (euid=0): forcing real = effective See https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=797653 for details. As a possible solution, I tried to install nullmailer, with the intention for PHP to call nullmailer, which would be configured to drop the mail to exim4 via SMTP. However, installing nullmailer fails because exim4-config conflicts with it. Looking more closely, it seems exim4-config actually intentionally conflicts with all other MTAs. Looking in the changelog, I found this entry (from 4.30-1 in 2003): * exim4-config now conflicts with non-exim4 packages providing MTA, to keep dselect from automatically installing it (and -base) on dist-upgrades on systems that use a different MTA. (mh) If this is really the reason, is there not (by now?) a better way to fix this issue? Sounds a bit like a workaround, unless there are also other reasons why having multiple MTAs alongside eachother is impossible. At first glance, it actually seems like having multiple MTAs alongside should not be impossible. There will be conflicts, but the ones I can see can be solved (sendmail binary via alternatives, TCP ports by configuring different ports or listenin on different IP addresses). Is this something that can (or has been?) considered? Gr. Matthijs -- System Information: Debian Release: forky/sid APT prefers resolute-updates APT policy: (990, 'resolute-updates'), (990, 'resolute-security'), (990, 'resolute-backports'), (990, 'resolute'), (50, 'stonking-updates'), (50, 'stonking-security'), (50, 'stonking'), (50, 'stable-updates'), (50, 'unstable'), (50, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 7.0.0-38-generic (SMP w/22 CPU threads; PREEMPT) Kernel taint flags: TAINT_WARN Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled Versions of packages exim4 depends on: ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.92 pn exim4-base <none> pn exim4-daemon-light | exim4-daemon-heavy | exim4-daemon-custom <none> pn exim4-daemon-light | exim4-daemon-heavy | exim4-daemon-mod | exim4- <none> daemon-custom exim4 recommends no packages. exim4 suggests no packages.
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--- Begin Message ---On 2026-10-24 Marc Haber <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Oct 23, 2026 at 05:15:36PM +0200, Matthijs Kooijman wrote: > > Is this something that can (or has been?) considered? > No. afaik, all MTAs in Debian conflict with each other for good reasons, > avoiding conflicts over the /usr/lib/sendmail symlink, Port 25, Mail spools > etc bla. > It is also a feature that installing a new MTA uninstalls the existing one. > That is a more common usecase than having multiple MTAs installed in > parallel. Exactly as Marc said, that is why this is required by Debian policy 11.6. Closing. cu Andreas
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