Thanks, that's good to hear.

After my previous post I reread the manual an discovered synonyms. I think that using synonyms in the form of

<internet email address with periods> == <local username without periods>

is an acceptable workaround.

I wanted to create a user "j.roger" and Mercury's add/change user function seems to not like the period. Is this a bug or a feature?

[quote user="jroger"]I wanted to create a user "j.roger" and Mercury's add/change user function seems to not like the period. Is this a bug or a feature?[/quote]

Usernames become subdirectory names and can be long names but should not contain periods. You can use the built in aliasing function in Mercury/32 for this type os addressing though.

From Configuration | Mercury Core | Advanced 

 Address auto-recognition settings

The controls in this group allow you to configure Mercury to recognize certain common Internet address formats based on the names of your users. When any of these controls is enabled, it tells Mercury that it should perform some extra comparisons when trying to work out if an address is local, by comparing the address with your local users' names, as they appear in the Mercury "Manage local users" dialog.

In the examples below, we use myname.com to represent your Internet mail domain.

Automatically recognize "Firstname.Lastname" forms   This is one of the most common Internet addressing formats: if you have a user whose username is peter and whose full name is Peter Smith, then his e-mail address is both peter@myname.com and Peter.Smith@myname.com.

Automatically recognize Initial.Lastname" forms  This is like the previous setting, but it combines your user's Initials and surname. So, given our hypothetical Peter Smith user, with this setting enabled, his address is both peter@myname.com and P.Smith@myname.com.

Recognize variants using either periods or underscores  This setting combines with either of the previous two settings, by allowing either an underscore character or a period to appear in place of spaces in your users' addresses. So, if all three controls in this group were checked, our Peter Smith user could be mailed using any of the following addresses:

    peter@myname.com
    Peter.Smith@myname.com
    P.Smith@myname.com
    P_Smith@myname.com
    Peter_Smith@myname.com

All of these settings are smart enough to handle multiple names or initials. So, if our Peter Smith was actually Peter O.Smith, then his addresses would be P.O.Smith, Peter.O.Smith or whatever.

It is up to you to ensure that your usernames are sufficiently distinct from each other if you use these settings - Mercury will use the first valid match it can find. So, if you have both Peter Smith and Patricia Smith on your system, and you use the Initial.Lastname format, you should make sure you enter a middle initial for at least on of the two so their addresses become distinct.

Waking up a cold case [;)]  

While the suggestions above go some way to help with internet email addresses that have periods in them, I think the suggestions do now work when Mercury is used as POP3 client/SMTP Relay.

In my case I download email from another server (with the POP3 module), where some of the addresses have periods in them. The associated usernames match the internet email addresses but omit the periods. This has not been a problem until one of the users set up an AREPLY.PM. The return adress of the generated autoreply message was username@<internet name>, so without the period. This is of course not a valid address.

This might not be a big problem (who replies to autoreplies anyway?), and there is a workaround possible by setting up an alias on the other server, but allowing periods in usernames would solve this more properly. Also, as far as I know the file systems of Windows XP and Vista have no problems with multiple periods in directory names. Not sure about Novell though.

I've even tweaked PMAIL.USR and the MAIL subdirectories, inserting the periods in the usernames and so far my test system runs stable.

So it would make me quite happy if a (near) future release of Mercury would support periods in usernames.

User handling will according to the development plans be significantly reworked in the next major release of Mercury, which should take care of this issue. There will be at least one minor release before that, though.

/Rolf