It appears that I can accomplish what I need by using outgoing mail filtering in Mercury.  My down-and-dirty tests have been satisfying; only the polishing remains.

Hi All,

We have started using temporary help in our warehouse and are trying to figure out a way to send messages to the warehouse office.  I currently have a multi-user shared installation of Pegasus Mail with 14 users and Mercury handling the sending/receiving of messages and am hoping for thoughts about whether an instance of Pegasus Mail could be configured to only send and receive between local users.

Brian Fluet

Probably I might be way off-base but have you consider Noticeboards? It can be configured in many ways.

I have messed with Noticeboards a couple of times and found them to be useful only for posting information.  I need more of an email capability (inquiry/response) between local users and the warehouse temp without allowing sending/receiving to the outside.

Brian,

Would it not be able to implement a Mercury server between the two sets of users ?  I always believed it was able to,  with my little knowledge of the functions of Mercury, be possible to connect/deliver messages locally, not just the Internet ?  Isn't it possible for the admin to act as a local post office ?

Am I smoking something aromatic.....

Martin

It's been a long time but help gives this info

·Local addresses: You can enter the username of any user on your file server, or on any other file server to which Pegasus Mail can deliver. You can obtain a list of local users at any time by pressing <f2>;you can drag and drop addresses from that list into any address field.</f2>

Martin, Shades,

You are both correct regarding the capability of Mercury and the local user address functionality of Pegasus Mail.  What I can't envision is how SMTP of Pegasus Mail can be disabled.  When there isn't an SMTP host configured, the default is the LAN mailer (Mercury).  I don't know of a way to disable that nor do I know of a way to prevent a savvy user from creating an IMAP or POP3 host within Pegasus Mail.  Can't restrict using permissions since full permissions are needed to the mailbox directory.

I admin to hoping for some ingenious work around that probably isn't possible.

[quote user="Brian Fluet"]I have messed with Noticeboards a couple of times and found them to be useful only for posting information.  I need more of an email capability (inquiry/response) between local users and the warehouse temp without allowing sending/receiving to the outside.
[/quote]

You're right, Brian. Anyway, Pmail doesn't need SMTP to send/receive messages internally so all you need is an instance of Pmail running without SMTP. Take a look at page 38 of the manual. It describes your situation, I think.

Again I may be wrong, but I'm not a Pmail heavy user as you. I'm pretty much sure Thomas Stephenson described something alike concerning that in some areas of his job Internet connection is forbidden.

Mercury what is complicating things. Pegasus Mail, without SMTP, will default to submitting messages to Mercury for processing. 

My mind is now working on whether there is a way to configure Mercury to allow local delivery of messages from a specific user and block sending of non-local messages by that user.

Brian, I never used Mercury in my life so I'm a complete ignorant on this matter. To be honest, I never got the idea of using Mercury mainly because Pmail is already a complete mail system (not just a mail client), as I once was told by Thomas Stephenson. IOW, and here I'm assuming my mentioned ignorance publicly, I see Mercury as a NetWare/Web server tool, and thus dispensable on Windows LAN.

Look what I found on Mercury's feature list: Includes both Full End-to-end and Relaying SMTP client modules, allowing

maximum flexibility for handling outgoing mail delivery. Ain't that what you're looking for?

All in all, I'll be waiting to see how this matter of yours will evolve. It is always time to learn something new.

Follow-up.

Just did a fast look into Mercury's manual (man-473.pdf) after a hint. Maybe the answer is in the Policies chapter, from which I got three that may apply:

This task only acts on the message headers - If your task only examines the headers of the mail message and is not interested in the body or any attachments, check this control. Mercury uses this control to determine whether it can optimize the policy application process by only extracting the headers of the message. Note that even if you check this control, your task may still be passed the entire text of the message, because Mercury only makes a single file and if any other active policy task does not have this flag set, Mercury is forced to put the entire text of the message into that file.

This task should only be applied to mail originating locally - If you check this control, then your task will only be invoked if the message was submitted to Mercury locally - that is, the message was placed in the Mercury queue by a copy of Pegasus Mail or another compatible client. Mail received via MercuryD or MercuryS never qualifies as "local" in this context. This setting is primarily useful if you only want to apply the policy to mail sent to the outside world by your local users.

This task should be applied before any filtering rules - Checking this control will cause the policy task to be executed before Mercury applies any global filtering rules you have defined, whereas if you leave it unchecked, Mercury will execute the policy task after the global filtering rules have been applied to the message. It is up to you to decide what order is most suitable for your site.

Policies pass the messages to an executable, optionally responding based on the return code of the executable or the results of a sentinel file.  Virprot by Martin Ireland works as a policy using a sentinel file and, upon a positive detection, delivering the contents of a results file as configured.

In my case, a script would need to be written that would process the message and return then return a value based on whether a blocked From: was detected.  One thing I am not is a programmer.  Besides, I only need outgoing messages check,  From what I can tell, Policies work at the core level so all messages get processed.

This has turned into a Mercury discussion so belongs on that list.  Anyone with additional thoughts on the Pegasus Mail side please contribute here. 

I'll bang my head on the Mercury machine for awhile and post on that forum if needed.

Brian

  Let me know if you want some enhancements to Virprot.  It has remained stable since its appearance Som 5 years ago.

Martin