Agreed, I have seen the same issues with some mail servers that treat 45x responses as a failure and NEVER retry.

Also, I did a bit of research when I tried out GrayWall and found that some of the spambots, spam relays and proxies have now been updated to retry when they see a 45x error. This means that the spammers and malware authors are starting to adapt once more.

If you want to see my blog posting about my initial results using GrayWall it can be found here:

At the moment I have disabled GrayWall. I may give it another go later this year to see if the bad guys and girls have adapted their creations any further.

Hope this is of interest?

Regards,

Martin

[quote user="PaulW"]

Another configuration that has been used with success when you do not have the backup servers under your control, is to have the highest MX the same as the primary MX.  Malware will be stopped as usual by the primary, while the real backup servers will be relaying mainly good mail.

[/quote]

I've just tried this with my domain and it seems to be pretty effective.  I usually have about 150-200 spams in the spam account each morning and the last two days this has been reduced to about 80.  I color the spam that comes in via the MX host and that is much reduced.  On the negative side, more and more spammers are retrying and so get through the Graywall. ;-(

[quote user="gregrshaw"]

Well with my Mercury/32 setup I can send via a UDG using the ~r and the mail gets queued with the "Reply TO:" address setting so the From address is changes for each identity. 

- Could you elaborate more on the UDG and how it works?

[/quote]

When running Pegasus Mail without Netware support a User Defined Gateway is used to tell Pegasus Mail where to put the 101 files for Mercury/32 to process.  It's managed with pconfig.exe and looks like the following:

             Gateway name :  MERCURY
           *New mail path :
   Is ? a program to run? :  N
    *New mail search mask :
      *Outgoing mail path :  \\thomas\maxtor\MERCURY\QUEUE
   *Run for outgoing mail :
         *Filename format :  ~d~d.101
  Run to validate address :
    *Reply address format : ["~p" <~r>                   ]
  Accepts SMTP addresses? :  Y
  Simple message headers? :  'Glue' headers
    UUEncode attachments? :  Y
          Burst messages? :  N    Gateway processes BCC? : N
      Strip gateway name? :  Y
  Force all mail through? :  Y

I use the specified "Reply address format" so everyone can set the From: address they want to use for an identity but changing the "Reply To:" address for each identity.  I can't remember how they work when there is both the Netware queue spec and the UDG.  One will take precedence.

Thank You for reply

 I have made some tests and I found only this:

If the home directory is on OES ext3 volume, the CNM file is written like Y05856?CNM

If the directory is on OES NSS volume, no new file is created.

 There is something wrong in writing files.

Thanks

I'll check those settings :) 

That seems to have done it!

Thanks!

Andy.

Oh well I've done it with separate filter rules but at least I was able to use notepad to copy all the addresses from my list file and then just paste in the rest of the text, quicker than setting up the rules one at a time and an advantage of using proper text files for the filtering rules!

Another question.  I'm looking at replacing Captaris WebMail with SquirrelMail.  I've gone so far as actually sending a test message from SM.  Does anyone know if it's possible to remove the SM identifiers from the header records?  I don't personally but I'm sure there are plenty of mail administrators out there that are blocking SM due to all the spam with SM in the headers.

Return-path: <x@bkbusa.com>
Received: from 192.168.1.3 (192.168.1.1) by BKBUSA.COM (Mercury/32 v4.01b) with ESMTP ID MG000E34;
   25 Nov 2007 16:10:04 -0400
Received: from 0.0.0.0
        (SquirrelMail authenticated user x)                 <-------
        by 192.168.1.3 with HTTP;
        Thu, 25 Nov 2007 16:10:06 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
Message-ID: <0.0.0.0.0.1193343006.squirrel@192.168.1.3>
Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2007 16:10:06 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
Subject: Test
From: x@bkbusa.com
To: x@bkbusa.com
User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.11                             <-------
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Importance: Normal
X-PMFLAGS: 34078848 0 1 723C85FA.CNM                        

Good point - thanks. Mercury is running on Windows Server 2003 and somehow there was two instances of MErcury showing in Task Manager, although I could only see one on the screen.

Fixed.

Thanks again,

Andy.

This was a user error ! [:$]

The user sending the email had missed one letter out of the domain name.
I had check and completely missed it as well !
 
So mercury did the look up and found the IP address of this new misspelt domain.

All resolved now.

Many Thanks

[quote user="Curt Cuppels"]

Thanks David. I basically knew the answer when asking the question but wanted to hear from the developer first. I scrounged up Win2K Pro to replace NT4 and TLS works just fine on that. Recent mailing list conversation concerning Mercury running on wine in Linux also prompted me to test that, seeing that I run several linux boxes. I brought up Mercury v4.52 through wine in Fedora 7. I am running with Spamhalter, Clamwall ( with clamav installed on wine too). Everything seems to be working quite fine, including TLS. To keep from having to run as root on the mail server I port forwarded ports 25, 110, etc. to ports above 1023 off my IPCop firewall/router box. Maybe I didn't need to get that Win2K disk after all.

Thanks again,

     Curt

[/quote]

I'm still working on the ports with my Ubuntu setup.  It's not a big deal right now since almost nothing comes in via the external ports and Pegasus Mail sends via the queue.  If push come to shove I'll do this with port forwarding like you have done to ports a normal user can use.  That said, since my Ubuntu system is way behind a firewall/router the bad guys will have a tough time getting to anything on this system even though I am running as root.  Nothing on this system is accessible outside the local lan. 

I was really surprised how well Mercury/32 installs and runs on a Linux system.  I know diddly about Linux and I got this up and running in less than a couple of hours after installing Ubuntu and Wine.

[quote user="Thomas R. Stephenson"]

I many times have WinPMail, Thunderbird, OE and Eudora all looking at the same account at the same time using IMAP4 without problems.  All see the same new mail and folders.  There is a problem with deleting since Mercury/32 does not allow deleting when there is concurrent access but I see no other problem. 

I have all sort of problems with Outlook 2002 and IMAP4 , many times it simply crashes when trying to do IMAP4, but right now I have Outlook 2002, Thunderbid, OE, WinPmail all looking at the same account al all see the same new mail.  No problems at all.  Mercury/32 v4.52 running on a HP Workstation.

[/quote]

Yes, you are right. That is exactly the way I think it should work. In fact, it was, prior to 4.52. Oh well, I can try Tbird for a while to see if it grows on me. It may give me the feeling I am on one of my Linux boxes. And any time I get to spend away from MS is good.  Thanks for your input.
 

As of today Jan. 2010 the problem described still exists.

Server=Mercury/32 v4.72; client=Thunderbird 3.

I could find only one solution to prevent the name of a deleted IMAP folder to reappear forever: edit manually IMAPSUB.PM in the MAIL dir on the server and remove the line corresponding to the deleted folder.

1) I also saw a similar problem revolving around the management of IMAPSUB.PM: I move a message-only folder under a folder-only folder, then it is impossible to subscribe to it. I.e, I subscribe, it shows up, next time I start TB it is gone, must subscribe again.

Cause: IMAPSUB.PM was never modified by my subscription. Yet the account running Mercury/32 has all rights on that file.

2) The renaming of a folder-only folders is also not working (message-only folder can be renamed though): it is refused by the server.

3) the similar issue described in thread http://community.pmail.com/forums/thread/21215.aspx is also still relevant today.

4) the issue on hierarch.pm described in thread http://community.pmail.com/forums/thread/2634.aspx of 2007 is also still relevant today: yesterday I saw that all IMAP sub-folders containing messages were moved (by Mercury?) under Mailbox, the tree structure still appearing in IMAPSUB.PM but emptied.
I.E. all folders in hierarch.pm appeared as :

0,0,"38488A1:165E:FOL0027E","231A164:My Mailbox",...

JF

Looks like it will work if I set it to deliver to a special header only!

 Thanks!

I would but it's restricted here at work, and I wanted to see if my home mailserver backup was actually configured correctly

Try recreating your SSL certificate in MercuryS. If that doesn't work, disable SSL in MercuryS.

Cheers!

-- David --

Dumb.  Ok, the "fix" I did was to create new self-signed certs, but when I did that, the file permissions were only for my login, it didn't inherit the folder permissions of the Mercury program folder.  Very strange.  Ok, so I fixed that.  I guess that is my punishment, better to just live with the periodic SSL errors I guess than to hose myself completely! [8-)]

[quote user="rhs"]Wouldn't you know it but Netware is "going away" at our institution.  Do you have anything to offer wrt migrating from an NDS environment to one in Microsoft's Active Directory? I checked out the wiki but no such luck there.  I'll search the mail archives as well.  Any pointers, tips, gotchas, bewares, directions would be appreciated.  Thanks!

I just responded here a few days back on active directory and Mercury/32.  There is nothing available right now other than a alpha version of dll to make the connection.  See my post [/quote]

Thank you for your reply. I think you are right, I'll have to start fresh. I allready started collecting spam (492 mails over the last 24 hours, just for my personal account!). 

[quote user="David Meyer"]This problem seems to be resolved. I am not sure if it was the dns timeout or removing BitDefender.[/quote]

Personally I think it was the latter.  None of the anti-virus programs seem to get the Winsock level stuff right when setting between server and clinet.