This daemon relies on those perl modules: File::Tail AppConfig Sys::Syslog DB_File # not actually used, used to be used # for creating on-disk-database, but this makes no sense # with small size ( in my setups list of allowed hosts # never grows beyond 20-30 ) Deamon should be run as user capable of reading /var/log/maillog file ( syslog, whatever ), best solution would be to create user 'pbe' who would be a member of group 'mail', who would own that logfile. For example: ls /var/log/mail.log -l -rw-r----- 1 root mail 971661 Jun 28 18:07 /var/log/mail.log groups pbs pbs : pbs mail Exim configuration. This line host_accept_relay = "localhost:192.168.0.0/16:lsearch;/var/lib/pop-before-smtp/hosts" explains itself;) (One should create /var/lib/pop-before-smtp beforehand, and chown pbs.mail it) pop-before-smtp.conf: #my $pat = '^(... .. ..:..:..) \S+ (?:ipop3d|imapd)\[\d+\]: ' . # '(?:Login|Authenticated|Auth) user=(\S+) host=(\S+ )?\[(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)\](?: nmsgs=\d+/\d+)?$';