One of my main gripes with Centos/Redhat is the insistence to use sendmail as the default MTA when something as beautiful as Exim exists and provides far greater flexibility.

Thanks to the folks at atrpms, it is possible to install Exim 4.71 on Centos 5 with the following steps:

1) Create /etc/yum.repos.d/atrpms.repo with the following content:

[atrpms-stable]
name=Centos $releasever – $basearch – ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/el$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
gpgkey=http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
includepkgs=libspf2* libsrs*

[atrpms-testing]
name=Centos $releasever – $basearch – ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/el$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/testing
gpgkey=http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
includepkgs=exim*

2) Install exim

yum install exim

3) Relax…

You can also install MySQL support for Exim from these repos by typing:

yum install exim-mysql

<bait type=’flame,troll’>So we’re getting close to making Centos work with the same versions of software as Debian and Ubuntu…</bait>