Just to close the thread: The poster has discovered that the problem was that by mistake an old version of Mercury with an outdated SSL library had been installed.

My server crashed and I had to reinstall mercury but I can't seem to get SSL connections working.  Are there any instructions on exactly what I should be doing.  I can verify online that my certificate is good but I just can't get it working in mercury?   All I have done is copy the certificate called mercurymailsystem.pem to the mercury directory and pointed ssl to that but I just keep getting a handshake error.   I also tried putting my private key in a file called mercurymailsystem.prk.pem but that didn't seem to help

 I think the most frustrating thing about this is that there are NO instructions so I'm just trying various things.