Ah well our new owners use hosted mail and access via POP3 from the clients.  They had wanted us to do the same and to point our old MX records at gridmail.  This seems a bit cumbersome and would have meant us having no central store of our email which could be backed up, and no archive account to cover us for legal liability under local data protection legislation.  I was looking at ways to keep our system while allowing GridMail to forward our legacy stuff and wondered if I could set GridMail to forward directly to our IP address.

 However there are other reasons for not doing this to do with the fact that we use our server in our internal workflow so it is better to keep our old URL as our local domain.  That means we can use it to do the forwards from GridMail which is what I have set up.  If however our new users insist on grabbing our old URL we could ask for a sub domain of their Domain as a compromise which although it is obvious was not an idea that had occurred to me.

 At the moment I am hoping they will go for us setting all users to have their from and reply to addresses at the new domain which I can do by making Pegasus send via SMTP to ourinternal server our our local network instead of using the built in link and by setting all the GridMail accounts for our new owners domain name to forward using SMTP to our old URL a set which is pretty much invisible to users.  I have this working for my own email already so its a case of job done if the new owners are happy.

Another question about our takeover by and american company.  For their email they use something called Gridmail and they would like to pint our MX records at Gridmail to presumably alias our old addresses to the new ones which is OK I suppose but we would rather not make the change for various reasons.  I have set up my test Grimail account to forward to our email server using our old email domain address which obviously would no longer work if our MX record was pointed there.  I have also set Mercury to successfully get mail from my Gridmail account using POP3 although this looks a little cumbersome to me as it would involve the server hitting gridmail periodically for each local user to get their mail.

I have managed to find out the Gridmail supports forwarding using SMTP and can forward nerurl.com to oldurl.co.uk but I was wondering if I could forward to our firewall smtp port instead, effectively supplying the information an MX record does.  That would allow the new owners to redirect our MX records while we still used So far this has not worked.  I think I need to put chrisc@ipaddress as the forward and set up newurl.com on Mercury as a local domain which I tried this morning without success.

 Has anyone else done this kind of thing, if so how did you do it or alternatively where should I be looking in Mercury Help for the information to make it accept the emails assuming that is the user@ipaddress format should work in the first place.

Please answer the follwing question: Is newurl.com the domain of that US company?

Telling Mercury to accept the mails send to IP-Adress you should have a look at section [DOMAINS] in MERCURY.INI or "Local Domains" at configuration of core modul. Click help there and you'll find exactly what you want including an example.

bye   Olaf

Yes I have tried setting up the domain of our new owners as a local domain, I've taken that off again for now though.  I will perhaps try again tonight after making some other changes.  

My real question is should username@idaddress work? 

You can't setup your Mercury with the domain of your new owner. The MX-recordy point to a server at your new owner. You have to do that internally with your new owner ... use their SMTP-Server and get mails for you from there. You may handle this with Mercury. Perhaps you can get an DNS entry including MX-Records like ourname.newurl.com. Forward mails for your users from the grid there. Maisl sent by your userss should be forwarded via MercuryC to the SMTP-Server at newurl.com for relaying. Pegasus should accept that domain newurl.com as local, because Pegasus should be configured for that.

username@ip-adress should work, but never tested that (didn't need). I'm not shure about the syntax in the forward, because example for domainentry in help is with brackets: username@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx or username@[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]

bye   olaf

>  Has anyone else done this kind of thing, if so how did you do it or
>  alternatively where should I be looking in Mercury Help for the
>  information to make it accept the emails assuming that is the
>  user@ipaddress format should work in the first place.

1.    You cannot put this domain name in the domains list since that domain is hosted on another SMTP host.

2.    You should be getting the mail from that domain forwarded from the owner of the domain.  Generally this means they are going to have to setup some sort of aliasing to forward the mail from their host to your host.  They of course could setup a domain account for you to pull the mail via POP3 (MercuryD) but this is not the best solution.  

3.    Generally what is done is you are given a sub domain on their DNS setup and all mail for this sub domain is forwarded via SMTP to the IP address of your host.  This means that you would be required to add this sub domain to the domains list on your Mercury host.

4.    The actual details on this have to be worked out since there are at least 100 ways that this can be done and the controlling IS group is the one that directs the process.  

Thanks for your replies.

 I do actually have a forward set up and working using SMTP this is forwarding to my old email address including the domain, I was just wondering if there was a way to cheat so that we did not need to use a domain name but could effectively forward to our firewall IP which in turn forwards SMTP hits to our Mercury server but when I tried that it did not work.  I thought the continued use of our old domain name might be a stumbling block for the new owners.  It turns out that the use of the old domain is pretty much invisible to users though so I am hoping they will wear that if not suggesting they make a sub domain for us would be a nice idea, thanks Thomas.

> Thanks for your replies.
>
> I do actually have a forward set up and working using SMTP this is
> forwarding to my old email address including the domain, I was just
> wondering if there was a way to cheat so that we did not need to use a
> domain name but could effectively forward to our firewall IP which in
> turn forwards SMTP hits to our Mercury server but when I tried that it
> did not work.  

I am not all that sure what you mean.  If you setup the DNS MX record host properly it is forwarding to an IP address.  You can have multiple domains with MX records pointing  to the same IP address, I have about 7 domains all pointing to my gateway Mercury.32 server (actually to my IP address of the router that uses NAT to send to an internal IP address).  All that would be required is that you register a sub-domain of the new domain name with an MX record pointing to your system.

> I thought the continued use of our old domain name might be a stumbling
> block for the new owners.  It turns out that the use of the old domain
> is pretty much invisible to users though so I am hoping they will wear
> that if not suggesting they make a sub domain for us would be a nice
> idea, thanks Thomas.  

Most corporate IS groups will do this so that the corporate mail system gets the mail and sends it to the remote sites.  They probably even have a document showing how the whole system works.