Hi, first I have read through a bunch of posts looking for answers on here but nothing really relates to my issues I am having as such.
I will first explain my setup then explain what I have tried.

My router (192.168.1.1) which is forwarding all traffic to my computer (192.168.1.2). Ports opened for the mail server are 25, 143, 587, 465 and all point to 192.168.1.2 which is my only computer, nothing else connected to my router.
Windows Firewall disabled, no other firewall or antivirus (fresh OS install) and I am using windows 11 Pro.

My ISP is talktalkbusiness and to connect to their smtp servers I use port 25 strait connection plain text and not secure. I use my username and password they provided for me.

The smart host name I use is smtp.talktalkbusiness.net

it was all working fine for years and I changed nothing but a few weeks ago connections began to be refused or timed out when connecting to my ISP's server. The message I was getting was Error FF queue job.

The log files really told me nothing apart from conenction timed out. I have been in contact my with ISP and they say over n over n over again it is my end not theirs.

I can not really find a realistic step by step guide on how to properly configure Mercury Mail but I did have it working fine before despite changing nothing.

Under Protocol Modules I have the options ticked as follows...

MercuryS
MercuryP
MercuryC
MercuryD
MercuryI

My PHP.INI file has

[mail function]
; For Win32 only.
; http://php.net/smtp
SMTP=localhost
; http://php.net/smtp-port
smtp_port=25

;extension=imap
[imap]
;imap.enable_insecure_rsh=0

It doesnt send or receive anything at all, it ignores emails created through my site and ignores emails created from the GUI send mail feature.

There are too many windows with settings to list here in one go but I am happy to do my best to provide details if needed. I'd appreciate any help to get this working. thanks

I forgot to mention I am using Mercury version v4.62

I have been away from Mercury for awhile so I likely won't be able to help with specifics but I know that v4.62 is a very old version. The SSL in that version is not supported by most email services anymore. v4.80 comes with the widely supported OpenSSL.

It was working for years with no issues at all from TTB. They told me I can still connect via port 25 non encrypted or via SSL or TLS. I installed version v4.80 but Sorry, I hated it. It is not very descriptive in what to put in the fields. It was impossible to connect via IMAP, although it connected perfectly to googlemail, but it wasn't googlemail I wanted to connect too.
TTB offered me several settings but all failed to connect, it just times out all the time. On version v4.80 I could not setup user accounts the way you'd normally do it nor can you set passwords for the accounts also the maximum characters for each username is only 8 characters long. It is hard to find anything on there. When it first opens it looks great but when trying to use it, it is a nightmare. The biggest issue I had was trying to setup the IMAP on it. After 30 minutes I deleted the whole thing and went back to what I knew worked or at least did work. Just found it to be not very user-friendly to be fair. It is a shame because I have always loved using Mercury Mail. I wish there were some decent guides on setting these things up, so we wouldn't need to waste everyone's time asking for help all the time.

Talktalkbusiness was a great service but the support is garbage, they blame us for their problems and hope we just go away

I don't know what to say. I started with v4.01, upgrading through 4.80. I don't recall any unique issues with 4.80.

You know about the manual installed with Mercury right? The last version is man-473.pdf. It wasn't updated for 4.74 or 4.80 but IIRC the Mercury help files were.

I found it really hard to setup. I couldnt create user accounts with names longer than 8 characters and it would not let me assign a password to a user account. I had no idea what to enter into the IMAP fields. For instance the IMAP Server Address, is it my local address or the talktalkbusiness address? does it need smtp. or mail. before the address? The login name and password, are they the username and password of the local user or the login credentials given by the ISP? Is it required to enter a name for that definition? If the username and password are for local users then why can we not add a password for a local user when setting up users?

The help file mentions, "The machine must be running a piece of software called an IMAP4rev1 server - ask your ISP or network administrator to confirm that this piece of software is available on the machine before trying to connect to it." My ISP wouldn't know what I run on my computer and since I am pretty much the administrator I am left with nobody to ask about it but here. Were do we get that software from?

Hi ?????

It is not really clear to me how your setup is, except that you are sending your email by smart host. If that is all you want to do, you have more protocol modules activated than needed. Or you have to be more specific about what you want to achive. The php mail function has nothing to do with Mercury, or do you run a webserver and has "webform emails" to send out?

Just to mention, to send by smarthost you need Mercury C and to receive emails Mercury S
That begs the question: why or for what do you need the other protocols?
If you want usernames longer than 8 characters, create synonyms.

And I don't think that there is such a big difference between Merc4.6 and Merc4.8 in regards to the setup of each protocol modul as you are complaining.

Johannes

My website uses a phpMailer script for site registrations, private message notifications and the contact us page, oh and I use it for my email address too. I don't use it for anything else but relaying emails. It has never worked without using IMAP that is why I used it. When I first starting using Mercury many many years ago, someone set it all up for me because it was all new to me. Don't take it personal when I say I don't like the v4.80, not everyone likes the same thing. The reason I mentioned the username only being 8 characters long is because my email is a lot longer than 8 chars so I cant setup my email on there. For me, there is a pretty big difference between 4.6 and 4.8, there is a lot of new stuff I don't understand, I don't know what needs setting up and what part we can leave out.

There is normally no reason to change existing settings when updating to a new Mercury version. If there are new features there might be new settings just for those that need attention, but that's all.

In this case it appears that some old settings may have changed. For instance, the setting to allow long usernames is in the field Mercury Core configuration / General / Local mailbox directory path. Mercury help says:

The string is a standard pathname containing one of two special placeholders - either ~8 or ~N. When Mercury uses the string to find the mailbox for a user, it replaces ~8 with the first eight characters of the user's name, or replaces ~N with the user's whole username. In most cases, you should now always use the ~N form - the ~8 form is really only for dealing with now-obsolete applications that only support DOS-style filenames.

If you have a copy of the MERCURY.INI file for v. 4.62 you should be able to simply use it with the current release (which is 4.91).

Wow, I am such a noob. I installed pegasus mail not the new version of Mercury mail. I didnt know the new version is almost identicle to the older version in the looks department. Now I have updated to the new version of 4.91. So glad there was a newer version with similar layouts I don't know why but I love the layout of mercury that is why I have used it for about 20 years roughly.
Now I will try and set this up and hope everything works. Will post back if I get it working or if I need more help. Thanks everyone for the replies, it is much appreciated

OK so after a lot of messing about, I finally managed to install the latest version of mercury and install the latest PHPMailer. I have a few simple questions to ask regarding TLS connection. It seems my ISP no longer allows me to connect via normal connection on port 25 despite them telling me it still works.

I would like to use TLS from now on but have never managed to get it working in the past. I have Certbot installed which produces a working valid certificate, will I need to use them for Mercury?
On the IMAP settings (MercuryI), do I need to configure the SSL tab?
On the SMTP Server (MercuryS), do I need to configure the SSL tab?

I was also going to ask, is there any screenshots of a working setup to enable TLS to help me get this working properly? Any help would greatly be appreciated. The struggle is real lol

Hello
nice to hear that you got the new verson installed an working so far.
As for TLS, it is quite simple, but 2 important steps have to be made for Mercury to work with TLS at all.
Assuming your certbot install and created certificates are at:
c:\certbot
your certificate should be at:
c:\certbot\live\mydomain.com
and there should be 5 files listed:
cert.pem
chain.pem
fullchain.pem
privkey.pem
Readme

Now the 2 steps for Mercury to get the certificates correctly with TLS working:
Step1: rename fullchain.pem to a new file name like domain.pem
Step2: rename privkey.pem to the same file name as above but add prk so that it reads like domain.prk.pem
Notice: my suggestion with domain.pem it's the idea to reflect your real domaniname in the sample or you can use any filename at your liking.

Now get over to Mercury and open the configuration for each of the modules, Mercury-S & Mercury-I
Mercury-S:
open the SSL tab
tick both boxes "Enable SSL/TLS support..."
For SSL Certificate file, enter in the form field the FULL path to your certificate file. According to the above enter: c:\certbot\live\mydomain.com\domain.pem

Mercury-I
open the SSL tab
tick the box "Enable SSL/TLS support.."
depending on your phpmailer setup, you may want the box "Disable plain text for non SSL connections.." NOT ticked. You have to check your setup there.

That should be it to get your TLS working.
For checking results I use the online test tool at https://luxsci.com/smtp-tls-checker

Just again as a note, my setup for certbot is based on cerbot from https://certbot.eff.org/ If you have installed a different one, the installation directory, directoy structure and file names my differ. AND don't forget to change the filenames after each renewal to the one your have set in Mercury.

I hope I didn't forget anything. Let us know.

Johannes

Hi Johannes
I have a small issue with renaming the privkey and fullchain files, My webserver and 2 chat servers use those files and changing the names will stop the webserver and chat servers from working.

Hi,
the only option would be to use a seperate domain name for your mail server and go from there.
Are you not using Mercury-D? If so, you may have to use TLS in that module as well, otherwise you may have problems with your provider.

PS. maybe it is not so common on discussion boards nowadays, but I think it is still good behaviour to communicate by name as it would be in a normal person-to-person conversation. It just makes it nicer and more personal as everyone tries to help-out each other.

Johannes

Hi,

as I mentioned in my post, you can name the file as you like, domain.pem or mymercury.pem or whatever you like. Just make sure that both certificate files are of the same name and the privat key file has additionally prk in it's name. So, if sticking with domain as file name, it would be domain.pem and domain.prk.pem, or with mymercury it would be mymercury.pem and mymercury.prk.pem.

Johannes

I have made a short video of my setup and uploaded it to youtube.

https://youtu.be/t1d2esmaXWE

You can see pretty much the whole settings. I have not touched the PHPMailer.php file, it is as I downloaded it.

If you still have the mercury.ini file from v4.62 you could copy the MercuryC settings from it and it should work the same way as before when relaying.

As TLS adds an extra level of complication it can be better to first get everything running without it unless it's absolutely required.

In MercuryS most settings aren't critical as long as the server is only accessible in the LAN. If you want to receive mail directly from the Internet there are a number of things to fix though.

I did copy the old mercury.ini file over from the previous installation. The main issue was that for some reason, I started getting the error msg Error FF queue job with nothing being sent out. Everything was working before perfectly. I contacted my ISP talktalkbusiness to report the issue, but they kept telling me the issue was at my end, but I know it is not my end at all.
It is like trying to connect to them with the wrong username and password or something, it just never connects to them at all. On Mercury's GUI if I click on File > Send mail message... it doesn't even send out a message from there anymore, I have no idea why? Port forwarding is set up properly. It will not connect using SSL, TLS or normal plain text.
My setup is pretty basic, my router which is local IP 192.168.1.1 then my computer which is connected via LAN and is local address 192.168.1.2 respectively. I tried using the link provided by Johannes for testing SMTP TLS but those time out too, says something like LuxSci does NOT support forced TLS with this domain. I really don't want to give up with it, I have been using Mercury Mail for a very long time to just give up on it.