We've investigated further and actually the killfile was working fine. Our mail client (not Pegasus) writes addresses to the killfile but also sends an automated response telling the mail sender that their address has been blacklisted (just in case they are genuine). It was a bug in the automated response that was causing the crashes. We haven't found out exactly what, but we have definitely pinpointed the root cause. Again, many thanks for everyone's help.

Best Regards

Duncan

Dear All

We have been using for Mercury for over 10 years without any problems until the last week. It has started closing for no apparent reason multiple times per day. We haven't made any changes to the PC it runs on (that we are aware of) and we can't find any clue as to what is causing the problem. I have a dmp file that has been generated (which we don't know how to read) that I can email if that would help someone to help us pinpoint the problem.

Many thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

Duncan 

Assuming there has been no active changes to the PC or to Mercury, and assuming it's the current version of Mercury, I would start by verifying that there isn't a hardware problem by checking disks and RAM, and disabling any anti-malware program that possibly could interfere with disk or network access.

Rolf

Many thanks for the reply. We are using the latest version of Mercury. We've not changed any of our security software, but have run full, in depth antivirus and anti-malware scans of the hard drive. We've also checked the disk and RAM, both with no problem detected. I was wondering if its just a corrupt file somewhere in the Mercury install, and if we uninstalled and reinstalled, would we lose our configuration settings. Or more pertinently is there a way to reinstall Mercury without losing our configuration settings?

Many thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Duncan

Just run the installer and select update to reinstall program files, configuration files will not be touched.

Unless there is a disk problem it's not likely that an exe or dll file has been damaged, though. So the next two things to test would be disabling any real-time antivirus software on the PC, and, if problems still persist, temporarily disabling all daemons.

Rolf

Thanks for your reply and suggestions. I am afraid we are not getting any closer to solving our problem though. So far we have tried:

- Ran AV check and anti malware scan - nothing found

- Ran chkdsk and checked RAM - nothing found

- Updated Windows OS and reinstalled Mercury - no difference

- Disabled AV software - no difference

- We don't use any of the additional daemons in Mercury

I have been watching Mercury running and seen it it shut down. There is no warning or error message generated and it doesn't seem - as far as I can tell - to be triggered by any particular event (eg POP3 collection). I don't know if you have any other suggestions or diagnostics that you think I should run?

 Many thanks as ever for any help you can give.

 Regards

 Duncan

I'm far from a Mercury expert but if I were you I think I would rule out the machine altogether by testing Mercury on a different PC, if you have that luxury.  At my office Mercury runs on the oldest PC in the house.  When I do PC upgrades, the old ones trickle down with Mercury being low man.  The transfer of Mercury from one machine to another consists of copying the entire \Mercury directory; no installation required.  Paths to mailboxes, queues, logs, etc. need to me considered which in my case requires insuring appropriately mapped drives on the replacement PC (Mercury runs on a PC, mailboxes are on a server).  I don't run Mercury as a service so don't know whether installation is required for that functionality.

As we aren't seeing similar behavior on other sites it's likely to be something local. Could you have another look and see if there were any at all configuration changes in Mercury recently? For instance affecting aliases, filtering rules or content control.

Rolf/Brian

 Thank you both for your replies. We don't have another Windows machine we could easily move Mercury to - we mostly run Linux servers, but I will definitely try this next if it starts misbehaving again.

Rolf - I think you may have cracked it!  We use a killfile containing a list of email addresses to block c/w a mail filtering rule. I am wondering if the file simply got too large for Mercury? It has a few thousand addresses in it corresponding to spammers. We don't run any other form of spam filter because we always have issues with them blocking genuine mail. I disabled the killfile/filter first thing this morning and the good news is that Mercury hasn't crashed yet today. Less good is the number of spam emails I'm getting but we can work on that.

Gentlemen - thank you both for spending your time helping fix our problem. I very much appreciate it.

Duncan

Good to hear that you were able to track it down!

According to Mercury help "using a killfile with more than a few hundred entries can impact significantly on the speed of incoming mail processing", so it could be you reached a limit for what the system could handle. It could also be that the edit control had reached the limit for how much text it could contain, causing the file to be truncated at some unfortunate spot.