Pegasus Mail & Mercury

Hello folks

 

Introduction to the problem:

 

Our present email setup comprises 30 Pegasus Mail clients served by Mercury32 on a Windows server (the APS Server). Mercury32 provides SMTP, IMAP and mailing list services. Mail is sent as apsarchaeology.co.uk. and received for apsarchaeology.co.uk and lincsheritage.org (via MessageLabs). Everything works fine.

 

Recently we decided to setup a separate mailing list for a new domain, heritagelincs.org. Therefore, this required that the server sending the mail should announce itself as something other than our default domain.

 

To accomplish this I have just installed a second copy of Mercury32 on a second Windows server  (the HTL Server). The second copy of Mercury32 announces itself as heritagelincs.org.

 

The servers that Mercury32 is installed on are both located on the same LAN.

 

We only have one IP address, so I added heritagelincs.org to the list of local domains in the mercury core module on the APS Mercury32 Server and setup the MercuryP POP3 module. The new HTL Mercury32 Server polls the POP3 box and delivers it to Pegasus Mail accounts also located on the HTL server. Mail is sent out from the HTL server using the MercuryE SMTP module.

 

This all works great. I then setup three test mailing lists (double opt-in) on the HTL server and installed the MercuryB HTTP module to enable mailing list subscriptions via the web.

 

Web access to both the mailing lists on the APS and the HTL servers is done by assigning MLSS traffic to ports 8081 for APS and 8082 for HTL. The router forwards the traffic to the appropriate Windows server. This works fine.

 

My problem is that if I setup a mail account and give it a name already used on the APS Mercury32/Pegasus Mail installation, the APS server will deliver the mail to the corresponding APS Pegasus Mail account. OK, I thought - the HTL server is going to be used purely for mailing list management. I'll just create 'manager' accounts with different names. But, what I forgot was that Mercury32 uses a default mail account - maiser@ - to service subscription confirmations.

 

So, although I could access and successfully request subscription to each of the three test mailing lists on the HTL server, my subscription confirmation replies are received by the APS server and then dealt with by maiser@apsarchaeology.co.uk instead of maiser@heritagelincs.org. This results in an error message because the mailing lists are not present on the APS server

 

Can anyone help me resolve this please? Thomas had previously suggested asking MessageLabs if they can deliver mail from the new domain to a different port. I contacted ML about this, but they say they cannot change this.

 

I have looked at the mercury.ini file and see that maiser is listed as an option thus:

 

[Maiser]

Maiser:          Maiser   # 'Username' of mail server account

Helpfile:        C:\MERCURY\Mercury\MAISER.HLP   # Help sent on failed maiser requests

Lookupfile:      C:\MERCURY\Mercury\MAISER.LKP   # Format file for the 'lookup' command

Send_dir:        C:\MERCURY\Mercury\SENDABLE   # Directory for the 'send' command

Logfile:         C:\MERCURY\Logs\Maiser\~y-~m-~d.LOG   # Mail server log file

Notify:          C:\MERCURY\Mercury\TMP   # Dir. for pending 'notify' commands

NoList:          N   # If 'Y', disable the 'list' command

Local_only:      Y   # If 'Y', local 'notify' commands only

 

If I changed this to:

 

[Maiser]

Maiser:          HTL-Maiser   # 'Username' of mail server account

Helpfile:        C:\MERCURY\Mercury\HTL-MAISER.HLP   # Help sent on failed maiser requests

Lookupfile:      C:\MERCURY\Mercury\HTL-MAISER.LKP   # Format file for the 'lookup' command

Send_dir:        C:\MERCURY\Mercury\SENDABLE   # Directory for the 'send' command

Logfile:         C:\MERCURY\Logs\HTL-Maiser\~y-~m-~d.LOG   # Mail server log file

Notify:          C:\MERCURY\Mercury\TMP   # Dir. for pending 'notify' commands

NoList:          N   # If 'Y', disable the 'list' command

Local_only:      Y   # If 'Y', local 'notify' commands only

 

and renamed the corresponding files accordingly would it solve the problem, or is the maiser address and other maiser information hard-coded into Mercury32? Should the header remain unchanged [Maiser]?

 

Thanks to anyone for any help with this.

> My problem is that if I setup a mail account and give it a name already
> used on the APS Mercury32/Pegasus Mail installation, the APS server
> will deliver the mail to the corresponding APS Pegasus Mail account.
> OK, I thought - the HTL server is going to be used purely for mailing
> list management. I'll just create 'manager' accounts with different
> names. But, what I forgot was that Mercury32 uses a default mail
> account - maiser@ - to service subscription confirmations.
>
> So, although I could access and successfully request subscription to
> each of the three test mailing lists on the HTL server, my subscription
> confirmation replies are received by the APS server and then dealt with
> by maiser@apsarchaeology.co.uk instead of maiser@heritagelincs.org.
>
> Can anyone help me resolve this please? Thomas had previously suggested
> asking MessageLabs if they can deliver mail from the new domain to a
> different port. I contacted ML about this, but they say they cannot
> change this.
>
>  

I assume you are using MercuryE for sending.  How about using an alias maiser@heritagelincs.org to maiser@[192.168.x.x] to route the mail to MercuryS on the heritagelincs.org server.  You can do the same thing for the mailing lists as well.  One the heritagelincs.org server you may have to alias maiser@[192.168.x.x] to maiser@heritagelincs.org so it gets to maiser. 

Edit:  FWIW, I do have three separate domains arriving at one Mercury/32 setup and I create domain accounts for two of them.  For the Mercury/32 server supporting the domain I simply use MercuryD to get all the mail for the domain.  This works fine for me since all mail for the domain goes to the domain account with the original SMTP RCPT TO: address to be used by MercuryD in the mail delivery.

 

 

 

---

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

I do not answer private messages from the forum. If you want to contact me use email to techsupp@tstephenson.com.

Hi Thomas, thanks for your reply.

The APS server uses the SMTP client for sending mail. Because we use MessageLabs email services, they filter both inbound and outbound email. Therefore, we need to specify ML mail server addresses for both. As far as I am aware only the MercuryC module allows configuration of a server address to which mail can be sent. The MercuryS SMTP server is used to send mail from the APS Server, so of course we specify the MessageLabs adresses and block all others in the MercuryS configuration.

When I was initially testing this I did setup MercuryS on the HTL server and configured the address of the APS server as being the only address it was allowed to accept mail from. 192.168.0.70 = APS server and 192.168.0.5 = HTL server. I tried using a global filtering rule on the APS server to forward mail destined for heritagelincs.org to user@[192.1680.0.5] but although the Mercury Core module on the APS server showed that the rule had been triggered, no mail arrived at the HTL server. I assumed this was because it was being sent via the MessageLabs server which presumably dropped it. This is why I setup the POP3 server and client instead.

If changing the name of the maiser account is unlikely to have any adverse effect on the Mercury32 installation then I will try changing it. Everything is still at the testing stage so nothing is live which means I can afford to reinstall Mercury32 if anything goes wrong.

Cheers!

It worked.

I created a htl-maiser Pegasus Mail account on both servers, edited the mercury.ini file on the HTL server so that it contained:

[Maiser]

Maiser:          HTL-Maiser   # 'Username' of mail server account

Helpfile:        C:\MERCURY\Mercury\MAISER.HLP   # Help sent on failed maiser requests

Lookupfile:      C:\MERCURY\Mercury\MAISER.LKP   # Format file for the 'lookup' command

Send_dir:        C:\MERCURY\Mercury\SENDABLE   # Directory for the 'send' command

Logfile:         C:\MERCURY\Logs\Maiser\~y-~m-~d.LOG   # Mail server log file

Notify:          C:\MERCURY\Mercury\TMP   # Dir. for pending 'notify' commands

NoList:          N   # If 'Y', disable the 'list' command

Local_only:      Y   # If 'Y', local 'notify' commands only

 

and replaced every instance of 'maiser' with 'htl-maiser' in the *.mer files in the root of the Mercury installation folder.

 

All mail for these lists is now accepted by the APS server. The HTL server polls the pop3 box and collects the mail for htl-maiser, and all introductory emails sent to subscribers after they ahve successfully joined a list contain the correct htl-maiser@heritagelincs.org address.

 

Hoorah!