Greetings!

I used to run a licensed Mercury server for our company years ago but was forced to switch to MS Exchange by a new manager. I am now trying to setup my own Mercury server for personal use because I'm sick of my provider putting almost EVERYTHING in my junk folder. Unfortunately I have forgotten much of what I knew regarding the setup of Mercury.
I am at the point where I am able to receive mail for my domain but I can not get aliases working. My local user name is "dstevenson" and this is what I entered in c:\mercury\mercury\alias.mer:

(domain name changed for privacy)

dan.stevenson@mydomain.com == dstevenson

I exited and restarted Mercury and sent test emails from a different address but they get rejected with user dan.stevenson@mydomain.com not known.

What could I have done wrong with my setup? Not sure where to look. What information should I post to get help?

Avoid trying to edit alias.mer manually, go to the Configuration menu / Aliases instead!

Rolf,

That was how I tried to enter the aliases at first but it only allowed saving one entry to the alias.mer file, each new entry had overwrote the previous entry when i opened the file to check.

I read the alias.smp sample file and it suggested editing that file and saving it as alias.mer so I tried that and it worked. My original alias.mer file must have been corrupted.

Thank you very much for your quick reply.

Dan

Hi Dan,
instead of an alias.mer file we got a synonym.mer file in place since years. The synonym file is translating our internal user names to external addresses since our local Mercury is not registered as MX domain. Our MX record is with the ISP where all of our mailboxes reside. They will be polled permanently by Mercury.

The synonym.mer has to be built from a text file of the same format:

john.doe@myinternetdomain.com == jd
internet email address == internal user name (dont forget the empty spaces before and behind the equal signs)

If the text file (e.g. synonym.txt) is created you have to "translate" it to synonym.mer by using the Mercury tool fsynonym.exe

So that several users can use the same e-mail address, we have created a file with:
info@mydomain.de = info1
info@mydomain.de = info2
The FSYNONYM.EXE from 2002 translated the content without any problems. The new version shipped with Mercury 4.9 reports: Warning: cannot map synonym 'info@mydomain.de' to multiple users.

As far as I know this is impossible. Two (or more) different local users cannot belong to one external email address. This would mean that Mercury has to distribute a mail intended for info@mydomain.de to different inboxes of local users.

Further problem ..., local user "info1" doesn't know anything about the processing state of the email copied to user "info2" (is it already read, answered, moved, etc.)

In case you want to grant access to a local mailbox, like info@mydomain.de, to more than one users, you should think about IMAP.
Here with us we have different common mailboxes, where different users are able to simultaneously access to via IMAP, using e.g. Thunderbird or Roundcube. This works fine.
But this is impossible using Pmail with direct Mercury integration, since Pmail is locking a mailbox and nobody else is able to access as long as Pmail is accessing this mailbox. Alternatively you could use "Public Folders" in Pmail. But this is a little bit tricky to configure. The IMAP solution is much easier. And in that case you could arrange only one entry in your synonym.mer database, since all IMAP clients are simultaneously logging-in with the same user credentials to one and only local mailbox.

Joerg, Would a filter that copies messages sent to info@mydomain.de into info1 and info2 would work? I have been away from Mercury too long to recall if this is feasible but it sure feels familiar.

Duke,

Just curious. Why not just setup mailing lists in Mercury to distribute the mail to multiple local addresses?

IMAP is good for multiple connections but when more than one user has access to the folders you can end up with other problems like folders being accidentally moved or deleted. I'm dealing with that issue right now for one of my clients that uses one email address on multiple workstations used by several employees.

Yes, of course, both would work as well. But when hearing addresses like "info@mydomain.de", I wouldn't prefer copying a mail to different local user accounts. In such case user1 is not able to see whether user2 has already answered to a customer enquiry, or whatever.
Additionally each user would answer with it's own email address which is different from the "info" address, isn't it?

Of course, a little bit of discipline has to be kept when using IMAP. For example I would forbid the use of "folders in folders". But in general we don't experience so much issues when different users are simultaneously accessing one mailbox by IMAP.

Duke should a little bit more detail his intensions regarding the "info" mailbox.

For the incomming e-mails we use the "Public Folders" in Pegasus Mail! This work fine, Mercury stores all emails in the public folder.
But for outgoing e-mails both users should use the same e-mail address. Therefore we need a synonym.mer in the Pegasus directory:
info@mydomain.de = info1
info@mydomain.de = info2

Pegasus Mail is directly connected to Mercury via PMGATE.SYS

I believe this is impossible, except you are using IMAP. The simplest way is to additionally install Thunderbird (or another IMAP Mail Client) at those client computers which should use this "info" mailbox. You could install Thunderbird additionally to your Pegasus, but Pmail should be closed on all user stations for that mailbox when starting Thunderbird.
Further Mercury I should be activated. That's all.

There is no need to make any further changes to your mailboxes and you could still use Pegasus. Since some of my users prefer working with Thunderbird, I've installed both Pmail and Thunderbird on my PC to verify any reported problems.
And as long as Mercury I is situated and listening on internal LAN there is no need to install certificates or other security related things. if you need some settings of TB or "Mercury I" let us know.

It works! We've been using it for several months. 2 users send with info@domain.de with different Pegasus users at the same time. We used the old "fsynonym.exe" from 2002, but only for the synonym.mer in the Pegasus folder, not for Mercury.

Very interesting and not bad, if this really works. Maybe Rolf could say anything general in this regard. I've also placed our synonym.mer file always into both Pmail and Mercury executables folder.

But as said, for us this would never be a solution since one local user never knows whether the other local user has already processed a customer mail which has been copied to both local user accounts.

As far as I can see there was a new 32-bit version of FSYNONYM.EXE released in 2012. That build was more or less rewritten from start to make it more efficient, and some error checking was added, including not allowing duplicate synonyms.

Like I guessed, duplicated synonyms is not a good idea, at least since 2012 update.

You should really give IMAP a chance. If you don't want to change your email client, because your users get used of it, try to make a stand-alone Pegasus installation at both user clients and connect them via IMAP to Mercury. I never tried this since we are using either "Fully Integrated Pmail" for single user accounts with one assigned synonym, or Thunderbird with IMAP access to Mercury for simultaneous multi-user access.

Duplicated synonyms in the Pmail/Pegasus folder should be no problem. So, I use the old "fsynonym.exe" from 2002, it works fine under Windows XP (I still have a virtual machine ;-)