I have in the past and am currently now running two instances of Mercury/32 looking at the same mail store delivering the mail.  Generally there is no problem at all and we are processing about 500 messages a day.  Just make sure the only thing common to the two instances are the same mail store.  The must have a completely different directory structure except for the mail directories.

 Edit:  FWIW, multiple instances of Mercury/32 on the same system is not a problem.  You'll have to have separate IP addresses for each version to do SMTP delivery on port 25.

Hello,

 I found some comments about this in other threads, but some questions are open:

Because of heavy spam load I want to create a secondary server (running in a VM) which can receive messages (only SMTP, not Pegasus), has an own queue but stores in the same mailbox store as the first server. Question: is this possible or do I get in trouble with the mailbox store about the creates filenames ? Could there be a conflict if both servers are trying to create a file on the store the same time ?

The configuration files I would sync between the both servers.

POP3, IMAP etc. will stay on the first primary server.

 Best regards

 Heiko

The probability for file conflicts of newly arrived emails are low.

Just remember to keep the root mercury directory separated, as well as ALL config files and queues - and only point the mail root directory to the same location as the primary server does.