The one bit of switching to Debian that was difficult was setting up Exim and SMTP. I tried using the configuration off of FreeBSD but Debian just has it’s own special setup. For whatever reason the FreeBSD configuration resulted in SMTP reject errors.
This is a helpful command for debugging the exim configuration – it really helps to know what Exim4 is actually doing with all those config files!
exim -bP
So I tried the Debian approach and that worked ok for receiving mail (which the FreeBSD also did). However I still couldn’t connect with the mail client. Looking at it again if I’d read that wiki closely and followed all the instructions it would have saved me a couple of hours… I just needed to uncomment the SASL bit in /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template. So always follow the instructions closely I suppose!