Well I finally got it to work! [:D]

The mention of environment variables got me thinking, so I changed the service definition so that Mercury would run under the account I used to install (and generate the SSL certs) and it worked like a charm.  Apparently Mercury relates the SSL cert with the username that created it....and that's probably why I was getting the -3 cryptlib error when I tried to run Mercury under a different account. 

I'm new to all of this so please bear with me.  I've successfully installed and configured Mercury 4.52 on my Windows Vista 64 machine.  I have also downloaded Firedaemon becuase I want to set up the mail server as a service.  However, I have been unable to make Mercury work right under Firedaemon.  Does any one know of any resource available online (such as a HOWTO) on how to make Mercury run as a a service under Windows Vista?  Thanks in advance for any information you can provide.

-YankeeFan-

I'm not going to be much help since I've not used FireDaemon  in years and do not have a Vista system.  That said, i do use NT Wrapper Pro and i've been told that it was designed to work with Vista as well.  It does have a lot of capability to run a program as a service and as a specific user as well.

[quote user="YankeeFan"]

I'm new to all of this so please bear with me.  I've successfully installed and configured Mercury 4.52 on my Windows Vista 64 machine.  I have also downloaded Firedaemon becuase I want to set up the mail server as a service.  However, I have been unable to make Mercury work right under Firedaemon.  Does any one know of any resource available online (such as a HOWTO) on how to make Mercury run as a a service under Windows Vista?  Thanks in advance for any information you can provide.

-YankeeFan-

[/quote]

How have you set up the service under FireDaemon? I have FireDaemon

running as well however under Windows 2003 however having said that it

shouldn't be that different. Also not sure what you meant by  "unable to make Mercury work right under Firedaemon"?

[quote user="Michellea"]

Also not sure what you meant by  "unable to make Mercury work right under Firedaemon"?

[/quote]

The service appears to be running but when I try to connect to my mail server with my email program...nothing happens...its like the service is running but Mercury is frozen. ????

Some things to check.  Forget about trying to use a mail client until you know the service is working.

Port blocking on? 

Can you telnet into ports 110 and 25?  If you set these to alternate ports like 587 and 1100 can you connect via telnet? 

Do you have the Vista firewall turned on? Is both FireDaemon and Mercury/32 allowed to access the Internet? Can you run the Firedaemon and Mercury/32 service as a specific user?

[quote user="Thomas R. Stephenson"]

Some things to check.  Forget about trying to use a mail client until you know the service is working.

Port blocking on? 

Can you telnet into ports 110 and 25?  If you set these to alternate ports like 587 and 1100 can you connect via telnet? 

Do you have the Vista firewall turned on? Is both FireDaemon and Mercury/32 allowed to access the Internet? Can you run the Firedaemon and Mercury/32 service as a specific user?

[/quote]

YankeeFan, try telnet'ing to the ports Thomas suggested to make sure the service is available.Also check your firewall rules. I'm guessing you are running POP3. If you are running IMAP, you'll need to telnet to port 143. 

Vista Firewall is disabled.  I have forwarded ports 25 and 110 on my router to the machine running Mercury.  I can actually telnet into port 25 and port 110 on the local machine and also remotely.  (remotely I went so far as to telnet into 110 and send the USER and PASS commands and got back how many messages were there).  However when I try to download email or send email through Thunderbird here's what I get:

When sending a message:

"Sending of message failed.  The message could not be sent because connecting to SMTP at xxxxxxx.xxx failed."

When trying to retrieve mail via POP3, Thunderbird just sits there and then eventually tells me it timed out.

I thought it might be an issue with Thunderbird, so I tried Pegasus, with pretty much the same result (except different error messages):

Sending and Receiving: 15. Peer connect failure.

Now if I run Mercury standalone (ie, not as a service...they all work like a charm)...so obviously FireDaemon is doing something (or I'm just too thick to figure it out)

If you can connect from the same station that is running Thunderbird via Telnet and can't via Thunderbird then maybe it's Thunderbird being blocked.  Could you be more specific about what you get where you get it are making the telnet connection to the service.  There is no reason in the world that an email client can't do what a telnet client is doing unless something is blocking.

[quote user="YankeeFan"]

Vista Firewall is disabled.  I have forwarded ports 25 and 110 on my router to the machine running Mercury.  I can actually telnet into port 25 and port 110 on the local machine and also remotely.  (remotely I went so far as to telnet into 110 and send the USER and PASS commands and got back how many messages were there).  However when I try to download email or send email through Thunderbird here's what I get:

When sending a message:

"Sending of message failed.  The message could not be sent because connecting to SMTP at xxxxxxx.xxx failed."

When trying to retrieve mail via POP3, Thunderbird just sits there and then eventually tells me it timed out.

I thought it might be an issue with Thunderbird, so I tried Pegasus, with pretty much the same result (except different error messages):

Sending and Receiving: 15. Peer connect failure.

Now if I run Mercury standalone (ie, not as a service...they all work like a charm)...so obviously FireDaemon is doing something (or I'm just too thick to figure it out)

[/quote]

Ok. Correct me if I am wrong.

1. Mercury is installed on Microsoft Vista.

2. You have ThunderBird installed on Microsoft Vista

3. You have attempted to telnet to Mercury on Microsoft Vista and it works.

4. You have attempted to telnet to Mercury remotely from another PC/Server and it works.

5. What IP address have you assigned to Mercury?

6. What IP address or domain is ThunderBird attempting to connect to?

7. FireDaemon shouldn't prevent you from connecting to Mercury via an email client since you were able to telnet. I suspect it's probably your Thunderbird configuration.
 

Ok, so I did some more research last night and after going through Mercury's log files I think I've found what the problem is.  I have SSL/TLS enabled on Mercury's SMTP and POP3 configuration.  When Mercury is running as an app (non-service), I can connect to it via Thunderbird and Pegasus with no problem at all.   However, when it is running as a service, the mail client will connect, but will fail right after issuing the STARTTLS command.  The log shows the following:

20: Error -3 creating CryptLib session.

Apparently, there is some issue loading/running CryptLib when Mercury is running as a service.  I guess my next step is to figure out how to tell FireDaemon know that Mercury needs to be able to access the appropriate dll's when it's running as a service?

This may be a problem of rights.  What user have you specified when running Mercury/32? If you are running with the system account it may not be given sufficient rights.

Originally, the service was set up to run using the system account.  I changed it to run under the Administrator account but still got the same result:

15:54:55.869: Connection from 155.201.35.53, Tue Jun 10 15:54:55 2008
15:54:55.869: << 220 xxxxxx.xxx ESMTP server ready.
15:55:00.315: >> EHLO xxxxxx.xxx
15:55:00.330: << 250-xxxxxx.xxx Hello xxxxxx.xxx; ESMTPs are:
15:55:00.330: << 250-TIME
15:55:00.330: << 250-SIZE 0
15:55:00.330: << 250-STARTTLS
15:55:00.330: << 250 HELP
15:55:04.246: >> STARTTLS
15:55:04.246: << 220 OK, begin SSL/TLS negotiation now.
15:55:04.246: 20: Error -3 creating CryptLib session.
15:55:04.261: --- Connection closed normally at Tue Jun 10 15:55:04 2008. ---

[quote user="YankeeFan"]Originally, the service was set up to run using the system account.  I changed it to run under the Administrator account but still got the same result:[/quote]

The system account has full rights on all the objects on the local machine. This account is sufficient for Mercury to run if the users mail directories are on the same computer than it (the Mercury log files have also to be written somewhere on that computer).

Just something I remember (I had the problem the first time I used mercury a few years ago) : when Mercury ran under an admin session all worked fine, when mercury ran as a service (with srvany and instsrv) with admin rights it didn't work. It took me a few hours to solve the problem : the disk were where located the users mail directories (E) was mapped to a letter (P), (because the connexion script for this user was also used on other computers than the server), I told Mercury that the users mail directories were in P:\mail, that was the problem : when no session was opened the P drive did not exist, as soon as I told mercury that the users mail directories where in E:\mail it worked.

Maybe it could help you. 

Regards

But what about FireDaemon and the STARTTLS module?  Since this works as a service without the TLS and not with these is something blocking .

I don't know but I thought to something like the %temp% directory located in something like %userprofile% and %userprofile% doesn't exist when no one has a session opened on the computer.

I had a similar problem when running Mercury/32 against a Netware server since Netware is not authenticated when the service starts.  With NT Wrapper I could use a specific user with the proper Netware credentials to run as a service.

FWIW, I cannot run as a service against the Netware v3.2 host and use STARTTLS either.  No problems when I use the normal Mercury/32 windows setup with STARTTLS.