Pegasus Mail & Mercury

Our department's e-mail server (running Mercury) suffered an irreparable crash.  I was able to recover some of the files off the server's hard-disks, including Mercury's "MAIL" folder which contained all our users' messages.  Since our department no longer has a computer available to act as an e-mail server, I have switched all our users to the University's (non-Mercury) general e-mail system.  Since all our users were using IMAP, they now have lost access to all the messages (5000+ per user) that they had stored on IMAP folders on the now defunct Mercury mail server.

So... I'd like to install a fresh copy of Mercury on a stand-alone off-line workstation, replace the default "MAIL" folder with the one I was able to recover, and then setup Microsoft Outlook on that workstation to import via POP, user-by-user, their e-mail messages.  I'm hoping this will allow me to save the .pst file created by Outlook containing all their messages, which I know I can upload to the University's general e-mail system.

Would anyone please let me know how best to go about setting up Mercury offline to achieve this?

I would do this a bit differently.  I'd try to get the original IMAP4 setup running on the workstation so that the users could do the mail movement themselves. 

1.    Install Mercury/32 to the workstation maintaining the defaults to c:\mercury.  The mailbox address should be c:\mercury\mail\~n

2.    Install the MercuryI IMAP4 protocol. 

3.    Copy the MAIL folder to the c:\mercury\mail folder.  If you were able to recover the pmail.usr file it should go to c:\mercury\mail.  The mailbox structure should look like

   c:\mercury                                  the program
   c:\mercury\mail                           the pmail.usr file
   c:\mercury\mail\<username>        the users mail directories with the users password.pm file

4.   Reboot Mercury/32.

5.   Use Configuration | Manage local users and you should see all of the users.  Each one should have a password assigned. 

6.    Setup Outlook to use IMAP4 and point at the IP address of the workstation running  Mercury/32 as the IMAP4 server.  The users should be able to see all of their original folders.

There could be a problem with the actual folders though since the original system crashed and burned.  I would install Pegasus Mail pointing at the directories on the Mercury/32 server so at least you could rebuild the indexes and folders locally if the users have problems with the folders.

 

 

 

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Thomas R. Stephenson
San Jose, California
Member of Pegasus Mail Support Team

I'm concerned that running Mercury IMAP on our campus network again will temporarily re-direct our users' incoming mail back to whatever workstation is running Mercury (their old department-specific e-mail addresses formerly handled by Mercury have now been redirected to their general University e-mail addresses; I'd rather not chance interfering with that).  Is there any way Mercury can be setup offline to allow an Outlook installation on the same workstation to extract messages for a given user?

The Mercury server will only listen for incoming connections, it will not change any settings on other computers.

You can unplug the network cable if it makes you feel safer

 

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