Pegasus Mail & Mercury

Hi,

I’m trying to set up mercury on Windows Home Server but when I get to the part where I’m adding user accounts (under manage local users) the program doesn’t do anything after I put in all the info. I can click the ok button as many times as I want but it still doesn’t do anything. I also installed SpamHalter and, although I don’t think that’s the cause of the problem, I thought I should mention it. I used this guide and followed it to the letter.

I can close the “users defined for this system” window and the rest of mercury seems to be working fine. If anyone has encountered this problem before and could help me figure it out please let me know. I know very little about mail servers and any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

You must have chosen netware support during your install. Remove Mercury, and re-install seems like the easiest move - and pay close attention to what button you press in the installer. There is unfortunately little difference between the buttons and the "default button" shifts places from window to window int the step-by-step Mercury-installer. IMHO it is both good and bad that the installer doesn't follow MSI-conventions (agree, next, next, go, finish) since you're required to make some decisions.

---

Kind regards / Peter

I’m trying to set up mercury on Windows Home Server but when I get to the part where I’m adding user accounts (under manage local users) the program doesn’t do anything after I put in all the info.

Looks like the mailbox structure is wrong. What have you entered in Configuration | Mercury core "Local mailbox directory path"?

---

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

Thanks for answering but I made sure to not choose NetWare support. I reinstalled it anyway just in case. Same problem.

The Local Mailbox Directory Path is C:\MERCURY\MAIL\~N. I went through the same steps as before (I didn't bother installing SpamHalter this time) and I have the same problem: when I hit ok to add the account it just beeps and doesn't do anything. Any ideas?

 

Hmmm, strange - Windows Home Server is based on Windows Server 2003. Unfortunately I haven't got one to test with. Do you use a localized version?

Do you have sufficient rights to all the Mercury files and directories?, and if you have any antiviral software installed turn it off during testing.

If nothing works, a last shot could be to install Rolfs HTTPServer to manage user accounts.

The only way I can get Mercury to act as you say, with a beep, when creating the user, is if the maildirectory c:\mercury\mail\peter already exists, but that peter doesn't exist as a user within pmail.usr. Meaning, the local user dialog will fail if the maildrop directory can not be created.

So you can open pmail.usr with notepad, and compare the list with the directory structure - but do not alter pmail.usr manually.

---

Kind regards / Peter

Check the rights to the directory.  The Mercury/32 user should have all rights to the directory and it's sub directories.  The beep is just telling you that Mercury/32 either can not find the directory or does not have create/write rights..

 

---

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

Thanks for the answers guys.

 As far as I can tell though, they don't seem to be the solution. Interesting sidenote: I can add a user without the beep if don't put the dot in between (my username looks something like name.name@...) if there's no dot, there's no problem.

Update:

I managed to set up an account! :) (I have one without a dot in the username). It can communicate with the client and the client can send an e-mail to my yahoo account. It can't receive an outside e-mail (as in yahoo to client) is there anyway that the server got it but the client didn't? How can I check? also, Why is there a problem with the "."?

The username in Mercury should be without any dot and isn't necessarily the email address used. If you want Mercury to recognize firstname.lastname address forms (based on the user's full name) check that option in Core module configuration/Advanced. If you want to have some other name form you can do this by creating an alias pointing to the username.

/Rolf 

Thanks Rolf. That solved it. Got another quick question. If it Mercury says that "non-local messages" were ignored where can I see these?

They are gone unless you setup a default user in the MercuryD setup.  From the help:

Default user  When distributing mail from a domain mailbox, MercuryD may encounter messages for whom it can find no local recipient; this will commonly happen if one of your users subscribes to a mailing list, since mailing lists usually do not indicate the actual recipient anywhere in the message headers. In cases such as this, MercuryD can be told to deliver the message to a specific, or default user. If you leave this field blank, MercuryD will discard any messages for which it can find no local delivery addresses. This field is only meaningful when you have told MercuryD to distribute mail (by leaving the Local user field blank).

 

---

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

Thanks! That's one more question I don' have to worry about! I have one (hopefully last question). I don't really understand the postmaster account. At first I had it set up totally wrong and it was just going on a loop. now I think I have it right (it doesn't loop anymore) but this is what it says:

Tue 19, 22:01:25: Job MG002585: from postmaster@bucataruserver (non-local)
   Created outgoing job with ID MO002586
   To: bucataru@bucataruserver (non-local) -OK

Does this sound right? What exactly do I put in the internet name for the system and the username of postmaster fields? Where do these e-mails actually go and how do I see them? Sorry if these are painfully obvious, but this is the first time I'm attempting anything close to setting up a mail server and I have no idea what I'm doing.

Thanks again to everyone.

Your postmaster address is non-local, which is not usually a good thing.

If you could provide some real data and what you are trying to achieve / how you want the system to work, then it will be possible to answer your questions in a meaningful way, rather than guessing.

 
 

Does this sound right? What exactly do I put in the internet name for the system and the username of postmaster fields? Where do these e-mails actually go and how do I see them? Sorry if these are painfully obvious, but this is the first time I'm attempting anything close to setting up a mail server and I have no idea what I'm doing.

The "Internet name for this system" should be the domain names that will be used for the maiser and postmaster function.  You enter your domain name here.  The postmaster address is the username of the local user that you are using for postmaster.

Might let us see you mercury.ini file to see what you are trying to do.  If you do post it, do not munge the domain names.

---

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

Sorry for taking a long time to respond.

I think I understand now, but here is the file you requested Thomas. I'll wait till you have a chance to look at it before changing anything. Let me know what you think and what changes need to be made to the postmaster account.

As for what I'm trying to acheive Dilbert's, I want mercury to download my e-mails, store them, and deliver them to my client computers, which has already been achieved. Later on I might add webmail, but for now I'm good to go. You have to understand that I don't even know what real data there is to offer. I'm am so new at this that I can barely navigate the menus. It's a miracle I got this far and largely due to the great support here at the pmail community.

Thank you to everybody who took the time to answer my questions. You have all been of real help, even though some of you may have guessed :)