I have two Mercury servers. On one (on ip xx.xx.242.145) I can send mail (MercuryE) to xx.xx.65.99. On the other (on ip xx.xx.242.149) I get a connection error sending to that IP. The odd thing is that I can run a java test program on xx.xx.242.149 which connects and sends, and I receive the test email, but not if I send through Mercury. I've turned on session logging and see nothing, done packet captures at the target machine (.65.99), turned SSL on and off. I'm bamboozled. Is there a way to get more debugging information from Mercury to figure out what's going on? Thanks.

and enjoy your favourite Beach Cocktail instead of sitting in the "dark" server room.

Hello Mercurians,
after waiting too long I started my long desired web-interface for Mercury Mail. What started as a small privat project became a little bigger as I realized when working on it, why not making it available to other Mercury Mail users.

After creating, testing and testing and more testing it was finally finished and is ready to use, if you desire.
I tried to incorporate as much "daily to use" positions as possible and hope it will help others to maintain Mercury a little easier.

What can you expect ? Here we go:

 Mail Server System
    Check Server Module Status, online or off
    Change various Template Files
    Have the Mail Server Lookup Commands presented
    Read and Edit Mercurys Configuration File as needed
    Start, Restart and Stop the Server as needed to apply certain Changes. For some changes a Restart is automatically executed

User Management 
    List, Create and Delete Local User
    Change User Passwords
    Create/Delete Alias
    Create/Delete Synonyms

SMTP Server
    Update the SMTP Authentication File
    Update the Transaction Filter
    Update the Compliance Whitelist
    Update the Kill File
    Create & maintain Connection Control rules
    Create & maintain RBLs    

IMAP Server
    Update the IMAP Login Alias File
    Create & maintain Connection Control rules

POP3 Server
    Update the POP3 Login Alias File
    Create & maintain Connection Control rules

Content Control
    Update Mercurys Spambust File
    Update a Custom Content Control File
    Update the Content Control Blacklist File
    Update the Content Control Whitelist File

SpamHalter Daemon
    Update the Sender Whitelist
    Update the Local Receiver Exclude List

Mercury Logs
    View the different Server Module Logs

System Requirements
A licensed Mercury Mail Server, as Mercury has to run as service, and a Web Server, both on the same machine. The Web Server must handle php, Server Side Includes (SSI) and if Mail Server Logs
are desired, Directory Listings have to be activated in the virtual host configuration for the logs directory.
The project is developed with Apache as Web Server.
Any other Web Server should work as well, maybe some changes to the SSI commands have to be adjusted.
Check the README in the archive for more detailed install instructions.
Questions, Comments or better ideas are welcome.

Enjoy!

Johannes

webinterface-20-07-2024.zip

And a few images as well. Those are missing the IMAP and POP3 menu items as they came later. But you will get an idea, hopefully.

The mail system is based upon Pegasus Mail 4.81 Mail 4.81.1154 and Mercury/32 4.91. This configuration works without significant problem since many years.
For some time now, we have the following problem. The user sends a mail through Pegasus Mail. The sent mail is stored in the Copyself folder. Mercury/32 sends multiple versions of the message.
Core module Log :
O 20240618 1437 MG000DFB <Sender mail address> <Receiver mail address> 12112
O 20240618 1437 MG000DFD <Sender mail address> <Receiver mail address> 12117
O 20240618 1437 MG000DFF <Sender mail address> <Receiver mail address> 12110
O 20240618 1439 MG000E01 <Sender mail address> <Receiver mail address> 12114
O 20240618 1439 MG000E03 <Sender mail address> <Receiver mail address> 12115
O 20240618 1441 MG000E06 <Sender mail address> <Receiver mail address> 12117

Mercury-C Log :
T 20240618 143707 2f64 Established ESMTP connection to smtp-pro.vtx.ch
T 20240618 143707 2f64 Begin processing job MO000DFC from <Sender mail address>
T 20240618 143707 2f64 MAIL FROM:<Sender mail address> SIZE=12204
T 20240618 143707 2f64 250 2.1.0 Ok
T 20240618 143707 2f64 RCPT TO:<Receiver mail address>
T 20240618 143707 2f64 250 2.1.5 Ok
T 20240618 143707 2f64 Job MO000DFC from <Sender mail address> processed OK.

T 20240618 143739 2f64 Established ESMTP connection to smtp-pro.vtx.ch
T 20240618 143739 2f64 Begin processing job MO000E00 from <Sender mail address>
T 20240618 143740 2f64 MAIL FROM:<Sender mail address> SIZE=12202
T 20240618 143740 2f64 250 2.1.0 Ok
T 20240618 143740 2f64 RCPT TO:<Receiver mail address>
T 20240618 143740 2f64 250 2.1.5 Ok
T 20240618 143740 2f64 Job MO000E00 from <Sender mail address> processed OK.

T 20240618 143740 2f64 Begin processing job MO000DFE from <Sender mail address>
T 20240618 143740 2f64 MAIL FROM:<Sender mail address> SIZE=12209
T 20240618 143740 2f64 250 2.1.0 Ok
T 20240618 143740 2f64 RCPT TO:<Receiver mail address>
T 20240618 143740 2f64 250 2.1.5 Ok
T 20240618 143740 2f64 Job MO000DFE from <Sender mail address> processed OK.

T 20240618 143945 2f64 Established ESMTP connection to smtp-pro.vtx.ch
T 20240618 143945 2f64 Begin processing job MO000E02 from <Sender mail address>
T 20240618 143945 2f64 MAIL FROM:<Sender mail address> SIZE=12206
T 20240618 143945 2f64 250 2.1.0 Ok
T 20240618 143945 2f64 RCPT TO:<Receiver mail address>
T 20240618 143945 2f64 250 2.1.5 Ok
T 20240618 143945 2f64 Job MO000E02 from <Sender mail address> processed OK.

T 20240618 144017 2f64 Established ESMTP connection to smtp-pro.vtx.ch
T 20240618 144017 2f64 Begin processing job MO000E04 from <Sender mail address>
T 20240618 144017 2f64 MAIL FROM:<Sender mail address> SIZE=12207
T 20240618 144017 2f64 250 2.1.0 Ok
T 20240618 144017 2f64 RCPT TO:<Receiver mail address>
T 20240618 144017 2f64 250 2.1.5 Ok
T 20240618 144017 2f64 Job MO000E04 from <Sender mail address> processed OK.

T 20240618 144152 2f64 Established ESMTP connection to smtp-pro.vtx.ch
T 20240618 144152 2f64 Begin processing job MO000E07 from <Sender mail address>
T 20240618 144152 2f64 MAIL FROM:<Sender mail address> SIZE=12209
T 20240618 144152 2f64 250 2.1.0 Ok
T 20240618 144152 2f64 RCPT TO:<Receiver mail address>
T 20240618 144152 2f64 250 2.1.5 Ok
T 20240618 144152 2f64 Job MO000E07 from <Sender mail address> processed OK.

On the other side the receiver receives really the 6 mails.

I restarted the Mercury/32 service and wait for the next problem occurence, if any ...

Has somebody encounter such problem ?. Many thanks for your informations ...

Anyone having any issues with Mercury recently?

About a month and a half ago, I started having random crashes of Mercury v4.91.349, 23. When it happens, it generates a deadlock.oqueue.log in the mercury folder. I've started using loader, and it recovers. But not sure what's going on.

Here's a sample of what it generated this morning..

-------
Critical Section deadlock detected, Tue, 25 Jun 2024, 6:20:54
Owner ID of thread attempting to enter section:  1796 (0x704)
Caller's private reference value:                0 (0x0)
Owner ID of thread marked as owning section:     1796 (0x704)
Owner's private reference value:                 0 (0x0)
Current / Lock count / recursion count:          1 / -2 (0xFFFFFFFE) / 1 (0x1)
Owning thread's system thread ID:                20504 (0x5018)
Timeout interval defined for section (ms):       360000
Difference between entry and current ticks:      1248656
IDs of most recent owners:                       1796 (0x704), 1796 (0x704), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0)
REFs of most recent owners:                      0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0)
-------

-------
Critical Section deadlock detected, Tue, 25 Jun 2024, 6:42:00
Owner ID of thread attempting to enter section:  1796 (0x704)
Caller's private reference value:                0 (0x0)
Owner ID of thread marked as owning section:     1796 (0x704)
Owner's private reference value:                 0 (0x0)
Current / Lock count / recursion count:          1 / -2 (0xFFFFFFFE) / 1 (0x1)
Owning thread's system thread ID:                23580 (0x5C1C)
Timeout interval defined for section (ms):       360000
Difference between entry and current ticks:      1245453
IDs of most recent owners:                       1796 (0x704), 1796 (0x704), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0)
REFs of most recent owners:                      0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0), 0 (0x0)
-------

After entering Yahoo mail settings, when doing just a Pop check (no download), this error occurs:

Top part says: "no response from host"

Error box says:
"05:47:02.371: --- 25 Jun 2024, 5:47:02.371 ---
05:47:02.371: Connect to 'pop.mail.yahoo.com', timeout 30 seconds.
05:47:03.446: [] SSL/TLS session established
05:47:03.446: [] ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384, TLSv1.2, Kx=ECDH, Au=RSA, Enc=AESGCM(256), Mac=AEAD
05:47:03.446: [*] Peer's certificate name is '/C=US/ST=New York/L=New York/O=Yahoo Holdings Inc./CN=legacy.pop.mail.yahoo.com'.
05:47:03.446: >> +OK Hello from jpop-0.1
05:47:03.446: << USER private@yahoo.com
05:47:03.459: >> +OK Password required.
<< 0017 PASS XXXXXXXXXX
05:47:33.494: 8: Socket read timeout
05:47:33.494: >> "

Possible I could have the wrong check marks somewhere...

Requesting help. Thanks.

Best regards.

I'm developing a web application that sends emails as messages to registered users. I've long used Mercury as a server and Outlook as a client. Mercury has been configured to be a local server and no matter what email I use, it always sends me mail to the same address. This way I can test multiple messages and user configurations.

However, in the latest update of Outlook I can no longer communicate with the Mercury server.
I would appreciate it if you could tell me what the basic settings are for the new version of Outlook?

I created a new user in mercury, added the appropriate aliases and added them to my smtp pw text file, and no matter what i do mercury says they user doesnt exist and they cant send mail.
Any thoughts?

When a user sets an autoreply in Pegasus, and an email comes in from a Gmail address (@gmail.com), the autoreply always fails with:

550-5.7.26 This mail has been blocked because the sender is unauthenticated.

This has puzzled me for a while, since it appears Google is expecting Mercury to authenticate to send mail. But, sending messages to gmail users works fine, just not the autoreplies.

Today I found the reason for the failures. When Mercury sends the autoreply, the envelope sender ( MAIL FROM: ) is empty, actually <>. Google rejects the email because of the empty envelope since it can't apply DMARC rules to the empty envelope sender.

I can't find any way to set an address to use for that. Does anybody know of a way to set an address for Mercury's autoreply messages?

Regards,
Tony

So, what I'm wanting to do is this:

I'm trying to copy my Dad's email archive, which currently exists in hundreds of Pegasus Mail folders, via IMAP, to a different server. My hope is to connect Thunderbird to the remote IMAP server, and to a newly-installed Mercury IMAP server sitting on top of this vast collection of Pegasus mail folders, and then manually drag the folders from one server to the other.

As I mentioned, I've freshly installed Mercury, installing only the IMAP component, and pointed it at the existing Pegasus mail C:\PMAIL\Public folder where his emails live. I got Thunderbird to connect to Mercury via IMAP, but then authentication failed. A little reading made me think I need to create a "local user" for authentication.

So I go to "Manage local users..." which pops up the dialog. I "Add" a new user, give it a valid username, a personal name, and a password, leaving APOP blank. When I hit "OK" from this dialog, the computer gives a little error noise, and no user ends up added. I've tried several different usernames and passwords, made sure the username is alphanum-no-spaces, personal name, no personal name, APOP, no APOP, nothing works. I simply can't add a local user and there's zero feedback as to what might be wrong.

One small clue is that at the top of the "Users defined for this system" dialog, it suspiciously says "Mailbox directory: ???" which makes me think something about the existing Pegasus Mail folders might be confusing it?

One other interesting point is that initially I -was- able to add a local user, which even successfully authenticated once via Thunderbird, but when I next launched Mercury, that user was gone and that's when I started not being able to create any more.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance for any help y'all can give.

(Edited to add: Mercury 4.91.349; Windows 10 Pro 22H2)

Good day - Anyone know of a quick way to audit how many users one may have on Mercury?
Look forward to a reply.
Cheers
G

After my last certificate update, I noticed I was no longer able to send mail, although I could still receive mail perfectly.
In my mercuryS logs I am getting the following error...

17:09:13.477: --- 24 Jan 2024, 17:09:13.477 ---
17:09:13.477: Accepted connection from '89.240.5.180', port 587, timeout 30 secs.
17:09:13.477: Connection from 89.240.5.180, Wed Jan 24, 17:09:13
17:09:13.477: << 220 smtp.aviandirectory.uk ESMTP server ready.<cr><lf>
17:09:13.481: >> EHLO www.aviandirectory.uk<cr><lf>
17:09:13.481: << 250-smtp.aviandirectory.uk Hello www.aviandirectory.uk; ESMTPs are:<cr><lf>
17:09:13.481: << 250-TIME<cr><lf>
17:09:13.481: << 250-SIZE<cr><lf>
17:09:13.481: << 250-STARTTLS<cr><lf>
17:09:13.481: << 250 HELP<cr><lf>
17:09:13.525: >> STARTTLS<cr><lf>
17:09:13.525: << 220 OK, begin SSL/TLS negotiation now.<cr><lf>
17:09:13.790: [!] OpenSSL reported error -1/1 during handshake - diagnostics follow:
17:09:13.790: [!] -------------------------------------------------------------------------
17:09:13.790: [!] error:1417A0C1SL routines:tls_post_process_client_hello:no shared cipher
17:09:13.790: [!] -------------------------------------------------------------------------
17:09:13.790: --- Connection closed at 24 Jan 2024, 17:09:13.790. ---
17:09:13.790:

I reinstalled Certbot because I could not figure out why I was suddenly getting this error, it is not an error I have ever had before. Any tips on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

In a few days our Mail Hoster (IONOS Germany) intends to activate further restriction for mail submissions.
For all submitted mails the mail sender domain has to match the mail domain of the user who submits the mail, where "user" means the user name (email address) for authentication the mail submission attempt.

All of our 20 users submit their mails with personal sender addresses to MercuryS, and Mercury C is submitting all of them to the mail provider via the one and only MercuryC user credentials. But all personal email addresses have the same mail domain like the "submitting user" defined in MercuryC. Should work.

So far so good. But in case I've set some Mercury filters where certain incoming external mails will be directly forwarded to the internet again (bouncing), the sender address will not be replaced by a local mail address. And this will lead to a refuse of that mail submission.

Hello All,

considering switching from Squirrelmail to roundcube.

Running roundcube for a different install I know that I can create folders-in-folders with roundcube.
Situation: Mercury with Pegasus integration mailboxes are containing folder-in-folder folders. Squirrelmail will recognize and handles those automatically without problem.

Question: does roundcube do the same ?
Or does roundcube only recognize folder-in-folder when these folders are created by roundcube?

If one of you could give me an answer, I would appreciate.
Thank you

Johannes

Hello Fello Mercurians,

I like automation, for what else do we have computers!

Assuming some people, like me, could use a little advise to automate the renewal of the Certificate process for Mercury, I had created a batchfile which will renew the Certificate using , copy and rename the files to be able to use by Mercury and run it at a certain time using the Task Schedule.
There is also Apache involved, as I am running Roundcube for my IMAP connections. In my case I am using the standalone version and therefore I need to shut down Apache to have port 80 or 443 free to use by Certbot spinning up a small webserver.

And I just did a succssfull run.

Certbot located at c:\certbot
Mercury located at d:\mercury

Here we go:
create a batchfile and call it by Task Schedule with elevated user rights.

First: stop Apache service: net stop apache2.4

Second: start the Certbot renewal process:
cd to certbot\bin and call certbot renew
which will renew one or all certificates which are close to expire.

Third: start Apache service: net start apache2.4

Fourth: copy the files needed by Mercury TO Mercury and rename them at the same time.
Files needed are: c:\certbot\live\domain\fullchain.pem and c:\certbot\live\domain\privkey.pem
To make this happen we use xcopy
xcopy c:\certbot\live\domain\fullchain.pem d:\mercury\mercury.pem /y
xcopy c:\certbot\live\domain\privkey.pem d:\mercury\mercury.prk.pem /y
The /y switch is set to quitely overwrite the files after the first renewal.

Comments: Name of Apache service my differ.
IMPORTANT Note: do not rename the files in the original certbot folder as the renewal process is looking for the original file names. If you want NOT to move the files to d:\mercury and keep them in the original file location, that will propably work, but I have not tested it. I like to keep things clean and seperate.

The full batch file will look like this. You can add comments as you wish.

@ECHO OFF
::
:: stop apache 
net stop apache2.4

:: start renewal process of all certbot certificates
:: cd to certbot.exe

cd certbot\bin
certbot renew 

:: start apache
net start apache2.4

:: copy certificate from your domain for mercury. Files to copy & rename
:: are fullchain.pem > mercury.pem ; privky.pem > mercury.prk.pem
:: use xcopy to overwrite file quietly  /y 
:: rename is not possible as certbot is looking for the original filenames
xcopy c:\certbot\live\domain.com\privkey.pem d:\mercury\mercury.prk.pem /y
xcopy c:\certbot\live\domain.com\fullchain.pem d:\mercury\mercury.pem /y

exit

The only manual change is to set a new date in Task Schedule for the next renewal.

This is very basic and I am sure there maybe other ways. Maybe we can add them and make it better?

Enjoy!

Johannes

Will DKIM be implemented in future versions of Mercury?

I have SPF and DMARC setup for my domain but after having to help a client recently with DKIM setup in GoDaddy for their Office 365 mail it got me wondering about DKIM support in Mercury.

Dear helpful members,

After years of running Pegasus mail without issues, a problem with receiving new mail has arisen and I hope someone can help me.
Upon start-up the Pegasus mail “you have new” mail pop-up banner appears (as normal) and may repeat many times if there is a lot of mail to download (as normal); however, no new mail appears in my inbox. I tried upgrading from version 4.80 to the new 4.81 Beta, but that did not solve the problem. However, if I shut down Pegasus mail and then re-start Pegasus the new mail now appears (under my red "is urgent” mail). Another new problem that seems to have occurred simultaneously with the above problem is that Pegasus mail very often will not close normally anymore. I must use Task Manager to force Pegasus to shut down.
Hopefully you may know a fix without a complete re-install? However, if I do need to do a uninstall /fresh install to solve this problem how can I make sure that my past inbox /outbox and all my folders will be brought back into the program normally, without losing emails or setting preferences?

Thank you in advance for your help!
Kind Regards, jacobsfw
November 16, 2023

T 20231106 112910 65480d05 Established ESMTP connection to 67.195.204.73
W 20231106 112910 65480d05 421 4.7.0 [TSS04] Messages from 191.96.209.122 temporarily deferred due to unexp
T 20231106 112910 65480d05 Job MO000013 processing complete.

unexp what exactly?

I've noticed repeatedly that the error logs cut off half way through any meaningful message.

Why is this done? - It is not useful at all.

The mobile versions of Microsoft Outlook have broken support for using STARTTLS during an IMAP connection. After sending the first STARTTLS command and receiving a reply, they send a second, spurious STARTTLS command. This gets misinterpreted as a bizzare, implausibly high TLS version by OpenSSL, which causes it to cut the connection. Outlook then reports an alleged "certificate error".

Outlook Mobile is still able to connect using the legacy port which uses TLS from the beginning. However, if you connect to the normal port, if it detects STARTTLS support it will attempt to use it even if you attempt to configure it not to.

There's a Python mail suite called Twisted that includes an IMAP server implementation and TLS implementation in pure-ish Python. I was able to build a toy server and patch it so that if received a TLS version of 63.48 (for example), instead of immediately disconnecting it tried to reinterpret that packet as a cleartext IMAP command and, if it was STARTTLS, send another affirmative reply and restart TLS from there. With this patch, Thunderbird, Outlook desktop, Outlook mobile, and Twisted's client libraries were all able to connect and run without issue.

I know this is awful, that OpenSSL goes out of its way to make it hard to support this -- and with good reason -- and that Microsoft should fix their application to comply with the IMAP specification. However, I've reported this problem to them several times and they won't fix it. There is no MercuryI Events support in the DDK (and its internals are specifically and explicitly not documented, unlike most of the rest of Mercury) so I can't fix this on my end; if I'm to get this to work, I'll need it in Mercury itself.

(I'm posting this here because the Feature Suggestions forum doesn't allow new topics, I don't think this is within the scope of a technical support incident, and Mercury's licensing system is down anyway so I couldn't file one even if I was wrong.)

We almost exclusively use Thunderbird as IMAP client here. It works very well and fast with the Mercury IMAP server.
However, we noticed one thing ... In TB we always move edited/read emails to other mail subfolders, so that the inbox folder remains clear.
But if you switch back to Pmail in between, there is a completely different, higher number of mails in the inbox folder. I.e. there are sometimes quite a lot of mails still in the inbox folder, which have long been moved to other subfolders in TB. The moved mails also arrive in the subfolders and are also visible there in Pmail.

Moving mails is also not accompanied by any error message. A consistency check of the individual mail folders in Pmail also shows that everything is fine.

Furthermore, we can also access our mailboxes using Roundcube IMAP web client. There I can at least see that the affected emails have already been marked as "deleted" (disabled). So to me it looks like mails are copied to the subfolders, but then only marked as "deleted" in the inbox folder.

Is there a "timer" somewhere when mails marked as "deleted" are finally deleted?

We recently set up a new installation and when I enumerate a list it will run once but subsequent attempts fail with the following errors.

The core process window shows “* Transient error - job deferred for later processing.”

The mercury system messages window shows “Core: Error getting mailbox information for MercAdm”

MercAdm is an alias with the mercury software that point to an email address that is valid.