With help from other users in Community tech support, I've just set up a Mercury server through which mail passes on it's way to an MS Exchange server. It all works fine. I'm using Mercury to get rid of spam before it hits the Exchange server.
When I was asked to set this system up, I considered using just Mercury, but the reason I did not was that I have to provide mail for thousands of users. I didn't see how I could use Mercury to manage that.
Specifically, I think Mercury needs tools to bulk create, bulk delete, bulk update & bulk disable user accounts, hold extra information: FirstName, LastName on which one can search, view the size of user's mailboxes and collect statistics on a per-user basis. The system is for a school, where I'd want to disable an entire cohort in a single operation, such as when a cohort leaves at the end of their 6th form studies. So, some way of putting users into groups and then doing a bulk operation on a group.
We have had to pay out for MS Exchange licences. A site licence for Mercury would have been far cheaper. As it is, our Mercury licence is for 1-15 users, which is as I understand it within Mercury's licencing conditions, because we only have an admin mailbox, spam, nospam and a domain mailbox.
I think that Mercury needs these extra tools in order to be suitable for 'Enterprise deployment'. Surely, thats where big money is being spent? Given the complexity of the rest of the product, I would have thought that some user management tools would be a relatively simple addition that would provide a big payback.
For myself, learning some basics about how mail works, the Mercury documentation is far better than anything I've seen for Exchange. Plus with Exchange, you have to get involved with all sorts of details about Active Directory.
Regards,
Richard