We want to keep staff and students separate, but that is excellent info if we want that in the future.

Thanks again for all the answers. Even though we wouldn't be using most of the features Mercury looks like an excellent product.

Hi,

I am looking to setup Mercury for use in an educational classroom environment and have a few questions.

Firstly I was interested in licensing. I have since read that commercial use requires the purchase of a license depending on number of users. We would either be in the 1-15 range or 16-100 range, and the price is quite reasonable so that is not an issue.

I would like a very basic install of Mercury to integrate with Outlook 2003 or 2007 to allow students to perform normal mail operations i.e. send/receive, forward, reply, calendars etc.

I am very new to mail servers and have tested a basic install using MercuryS and MercuryP which seemed to work fine sending and receiving (in very limited testing). Are they the best install settings to choose? The server will not need to communicate with the outside world so do I also select not to install an SMTP module? This will basically be an enclosed environment limited to a classroom of 15 PC's that can send to and receive from each other.

Another question is in this setup can Outlook be used to Share calendars or will it only work to deliver mail?

My final question is can Mercury happily coexist on a network with Exchange without any interaction between the two? We use Exchange for our staff email system and do not wish to open it up for student use hence why we are looking at other products.

Thanks for your response.

Matt.

[quote user="CuriousMatt"]

I would like a very basic install of Mercury to integrate with Outlook 2003 or 2007 to allow students to perform normal mail operations i.e. send/receive, forward, reply, calendars etc.

I am very new to mail servers and have tested a basic install using MercuryS and MercuryP which seemed to work fine sending and receiving (in very limited testing). Are they the best install settings to choose?

[/quote] Yes, that is pretty standard SMTP & POP3 setup.[quote]

The server will not need to communicate with the outside world so do I also select not to install an SMTP module?[/quote]Correct, no SMTP client module required[quote]

Another question is in this setup can Outlook be used to Share calendars or will it only work to deliver mail?[/quote] Mail only, although appointments & events can be mailed between users[quote]

My final question is can Mercury happily coexist on a network with Exchange without any interaction between the two? We use Exchange for our staff email system and do not wish to open it up for student use hence why we are looking at other products.

[quote user="dilberts_left_nut"][quote user="CuriousMatt"]

My final question is can Mercury happily coexist on a network with Exchange without any interaction between the two? We use Exchange for our staff email system and do not wish to open it up for student use hence why we are looking at other products.

[/quote]As long as you have a different local domain name on the Mercury system. If you want to run them both on the same server you will need to run one on non-standard ports.
[/quote]

Thanks very much for the info.

Can I just clarify this one point. We would not be running Mercury on the same server and would most likely just use a PC dedicated to the task. Are you saying that I should not connect this PC to the domain?

Connecting it to the domain is fine. The hostname of the machine is not the issue, but the 'mail domain' that the Mercury server will be handling mail for should be different from the Exchange one.

I just meant that in the [Local Domains] section of Mercury it should be set differently from your staff domain name (i.e student.yourdomain, so students email addresses will be fred@student.yourdomain).

You could probably get away with using the same domain name if you want, but this would not work if you wanted the two systems to talk to each other in future.

This may be useful so that your Exchange server is able to send mail to students.

If you wanted to enable students to send mail to staff without having an account on the Exchange server, you could install the MercE (direct SMTP) module and have an outgoing filter rule to deny any outbound mail destined for any domain other than your Exchange server's local domain name (or any other restrictions you care to craft a rule for).