Exim

Exim here is your sendmail facility. Normally you use it to send email. Not receive email. You probably don't receive email with Exim, as you sensibly use a Dreamhost IMAP account instead.

Exim 4

This is a typical configuration for a Debian system.

View your log:

tail -f /var/log/exim4/mainlog

Create a mail user http://panel.dreamhost.com/

Your smtp relay will probably be mail.example.com. In this example, mine is mail.dabase.com.

From Debian Exim4 Etch configuration setup a satellite configuration and edit:

/etc/exim4/passwd.client

And put in your Dreamhost mail username and password.

Test like so on a shell:

echo Please work | mail -s "testing" me@example.com

Note it does take a bit of time for Dreamhost to set the mail account, so your mail relay might be not authorising at first.

You might need to restart the service too:

sam$ sudo /etc/init.d/exim4 restart

Port 587

Optionally, you probably want to append port = 587 to the split configuration file:

/etc/exim4/conf.d/transport/30_exim4-config_remote_smtp_smarthost

This will use port 587 for mail submission, as many ISPs block port 25 to prevent spam.