> Actually it's not all that difficult to send a deffered  message, you

send yourself a message

> and then just copy the raw text into the new

message with the added Remail header and send it to maiser.

You're perfectly right, but I hope you will agree that this could be quite uncomfortable if you have to do it more than a few times in a row :-)

> That said, if this is really a critical task then you might want to switch to PMail since it does this automatically.  ;-)

I do use Pmail (since 1994, actually...) but I seem to recall the remail extension only worked in a LAN set up, ie when Pmail is allowed to put messages directly into Mercury's queue. Am I wrong?

Thanks again and regards,

  Corrado

Hi all.

I'm moving here a question which I asked in the Pmail Community Support forum elsewhere in this site, because I feel it's more related to Mercury than Peggy.

Quoting from Mercury's manual: "Mercury’s mail server supports two deferred mail commands - Notify, which sends a broadcast message to the sender at a given time (if broadcasts are supported on your network), and Remail, which sends a mail message at a particular time."

Now I'd really need to use Mercury's delayed mail feature, but it's not clear to me how to do it. I know there is a "remail" extension on Pegasus Mail, but I cannot use it because as far as I understand it works only when Pegasus writes its messages directly into Mercury's queue, while our clients

connect to Mercury exclusively via SMTP (and a couple of them use Thunderbird, by the way).

So I am asking to the more knowledgeable: is there any way to trigger

Mercury's Remail feature besides using Pmail's remail extension? Maybe

via some special X- headers in the message being delayed/remailed or

something? (I know this method can be used at least for triggering Mercury's Message Delivery Transcript feature via "X-Transcript-To:" header).

And, more generally, since Mercury/Pegasus manuals

and help files do not explain at all the inner workings of this powerful feature

nor the syntax to trigger it, is there any documentation around that

can give more informations on it and maybe help in using it?

Thanks in advance,

  Corrado

> So I am asking to the more knowledgeable: is there any way to trigger Mercury's Remail feature besides using Pmail's remail
> extension? Maybe via some special X- headers in the message being delayed/remailed or something? (I know this method can be used at
> least for triggering Mercury's Message Delivery Transcript feature via "X-Transcript-To:" header).
>
> And, more generally, since Mercury/Pegasus manuals and help files do not explain at all the inner workings of this powerful feature nor
> the syntax to trigger it, is there any documentation around that can give more informations on it and maybe help in using it?

Here a part on one of my replies from a few years back.  The remail command is

Remail year-month-day hour:minute 

The blank line between the headers and the message body is required.  The message is sent to maiser@<mercury host name> and the subject is not critical. 

----------------------------------- Remail command --------------------------------------

You can send mail to Mercury via SMTP and get it remailed. The body of the message sent to maiser contains the message.


Remail 08-6-12 8:55
From: stephens@bayarea.net
To: support@tstephenson.com
Subject: Test of deferred mail
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:49:00

Body of the message.

When I sent this via Thunderbird it seemed to work since I got back the remail confirmation but I have to wait a few more minutes for the
delay to expire. Yep, it worked.

> The remail command is

> Remail year-month-day hour:minute

> The blank line between the headers and the message body is required.

> The message is sent to maiser@<mercury host name> and the subject is not critical.

Thanks a lot for the info and prompt reply.

Unfortunately this method of putting the whole original message in the body of a meta-message seems a little clumsy and error-prone to me, in that it requires the user to prepare by hand and in advance the whole message (with well-formed headers and body) he wants to have remailed.

Maybe this could have been easy in RFC822 times, when message syntax used to be simple and clean, but nowadays it could be quite complicated to set up and put right in place all headers and sections of a full MIME-compliant message (not even mentioning the problem of digital signing a message that needs to be remailed, or adding binary attachments to it).

I would therefore be much comfortable if this remailing thing could be triggered by a special X- header, just like it's already done for requesting a Message Delivery Transcript as I mentioned before. I'm thinking of something as simple as "X-Remail-On: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM". In this way one would just add this header to a normal MIME-compliant and possibly multipart message, addressed to its real final recipient(s) and not to maiser, and have Mercury automagically remail it as a whole to the intended recipent(s) on the specified date and time.

The same idea could be applied to the other deferred mail command, ie "Notify", if someone is actually still using it.

I know this is really a low-priority issue, but I'd like very much to have mr. Harris eventually consider implementing it in some future release.

Again, thank you very much for your help and patience.

  Corrado

Unfortunately this method of putting the whole original message in

the body of a meta-message seems a little clumsy and error-prone to me,

in that it requires the user to prepare by hand and in advance the whole

message (with well-formed headers and body) he wants to have remailed.

Maybe

this could have been easy in RFC822 times, when message syntax used to

be simple and clean, but nowadays it could be quite complicated to set

up and put right in place all headers and sections of a full

MIME-compliant message (not even mentioning the problem of digital

signing a message that needs to be remailed, or adding binary

attachments to it).

 Actually it's not all that difficult to send a deffered  message, you send yourself a message and then just copy the raw text into the new message with the added Remail header and send it to maiser.

That said, if this is really a critical task then you might want to switch to PMail since it does this automatically.  ;-)