Hello everybody,

probably a fringe use case, but I'm trying to set up Mercury for my personal local (on the same machine only) IMAP use. It is not supposed to retrieve or send any mail from or to or in any other way talk to the outside world at all.

The absolutely only task is to provide an IMAP server that can be accessed by an email client on the same machine to move messages to the IMAP folders for archival purposes.
ATM this only includes email from an external Exchange account. I might include other accounts in the future, but that is not a subject for now.

I installed the MercuryI, W and X modules. No idea whether W and X are of any use in my case, but those were the only additional 2 modules I could not rule out immediately.
Since I don't own a domain or any static (or DYNDNS) IP address, I tried to set the domain in the initial configuration to 127.0.0.1 (for lack of a better idea), but now I'm at a loss and don't know how to proceed any further.
I could not find any instructions regarding my use case in the manual or in the FAQ of this forum.

I'm using the Windows 10 stock mail application. I don't want to change that, for the app's seamless Exchange integration. Unfortunately, I also don't know how to configure an email client to use an IMAP server running on the same machine.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

TIA
timbr

You will need MercuryI for IMAP and MercuryD to collect messages from the external server using POP3. Set servername to something that makes sense, like mailserver or mercury.

To access the server from your email client use address 127.0.0.1 or localhost if on the same machine.

Rolf, thank you for your answer.

However, I don't intend (at least, for now) to collect any messages from an external server, so I probably don't need MercuryD. All I want is to have an IMAP server to manually archive messages on. Basically, I only need a hierarchy of mailboxes to archive messages in and an IMAP server as an interface to copy messages to those mailboxes and provide search and read access for the messages stored in there. At least, that was the initial plan. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to work (more on that in a bit).

By "Set servername to something that makes sense, like mailserver or mercury", I presume you mean this setting:

Just using "127.0.0.1" seems to work just as well for me. I know I made a mistake in that example by omitting "~N" in the mailbox path, which I already corrected.

In principle, I seem to have it working now. At least I could configure the IMAP account in the client without any error messages, and the server seems to log the connections.

Unfortunately, I hit a major road block with Windows' stock Mail app. It looks like the app won't let you copy messages at all, and also won't let you move messages between different mail accounts.

Perhaps you could try a free email client like Pegasus Mail or Thunderbird and see if it works the way you want it?

Thanks for the suggestion. But none of the free clients (or any 3rd party client, for that matter) seem to have native Exchange support. So I could only access this Exchange (or Office365/Outlook.com) account via IMAP, which unfortunately has been blocked.
(BTW: The other way round, adding an external account to Outlook.com, has been blocked as well.)

Maybe the OWL Thunderbird extension could help, but that's a paid subscription (albeit cheap), and a little controversial. Otherwise, I'll possibly have to use Outlook (if that doesn't block anything again).

The only workaround I could find up to now is saving single emails as .EML from the Windows 10 Mail app to the file system and reimport them into Thunderbird. That's not really practical, but might at least help for the most important emails.

OTOH, if I use Thunderbird, I might as well use its own message store and forgo Mercury completely.

I could not find any documentation what format Mercury uses for its message store, but it looks somehow non-standard to me (which is bad for long-time archiving). BTW, I'd appreciate any pointers for that.

Thunderbird seems to use standard Mailbox (mbx) files, which to me looks like a better long-time solution.

So Mercury is probably out for me, until I find another use for it.

I don't know if I have understood correctly...
You want to fetch emails from any mail account with a mail client and also edit, write, read, save, etc. them with your email client. In addition, you want to archive certain mails (or all of them) on a separate, local mail account, e.g. via Mercury IMAP. Is that correct?

We have been using Pegasus and Thunderbird in conjunction with local Mercury user accounts for years now, but these also have to be managed via Mercury.
So if you want to operate a "backup account" via MercuryI, you first have to create a user (mail account) in Mercury so that Mercury first creates a folder structure for this "user". All mails that you send to this account via IMAP are then stored in Mercury's own format, regardless of how Thunderbird stores its mails.
In Thunderbird you have a connection (1st mailbox) to your "Standard Mail Account". If you retrieve your mails via POP, Thunderbird will of course store them in its own mail format in the Thunderbird Profile folder. Now add another mailbox (2nd mailbox) by creating it in Mercury followed by connecting to this seconds Mail account from your Mail Client (e.g. Thunderbird) via IMAP to mailserver MercuryI. Everything that you now move from the first mailbox to the second mailbox is managed by Mercury and saved in Mercury's own mail format.

(Translated from german with www.DeepL.com/Translator)