Ben, most likely you're suffering a reverse lookup problem. To my knowledge, both Google and Microsoft require valid reverse lookups as to accept inbound e-mails. As stated above, youre HELO or EHLO needs to match your actual sending IP that in turn resolves when doing a reverse lookup. Check up on your own host and mailer, to see how it complies by using the DNS-Report at: www.dnsreport.com.

Also, you say you don't worry too much about inbound, - you should! If your mailserver is reported as an open relay, you will be treated as a spammer. Now, since you most likely only will allow SMTP connections from the very same machine, insert Allow 127.0.0.1 into connection control options of MercuryS module. Since we serve many domains, we nearly only allow authenticated SMTP connections to relay, meaning to check the last two boxes on Connection Control in MercuryS. Besides the authenticated, some internal servers are allowed within connection Control, all else is thus only allowed to connect with inbound email to local addresses.

Hi All,

What a great forum! 

I'm new to MercuryMail, mail servers, SMTP etc so excuse my dumb questions.  I'm running Apache on Windows as a development server (using the XAMPP bundle) to test a data analysis tool (see bovianalyser.dyndns.org).  I'm looking to have the tool mail back the results of it's analysis to the user.  I've built the tool in PERL and am trying to use the fake sendmail (bundled with xampp) to use mercurymail's server capabilities to send out the analysed data.

I've got the pipe between the tool, fake sendmail and mercury mail running fine and nothing reports any errors.  It just doesn't send anything!  The message bounces between the mercury SMTP client and server until i kill it.  Any helpful hints?

On a somewhat related note, i've found the mercurymail help pages and manual incredibly dense, hard to extract information from and not very friendly for the beginner who isn't interested in becoming a MercuryMail expert.  I know this is a cop-out, but in this modern fast-code life we lead it would be great if there was a more readily accessible user manual, setup guide.  Is there already one out there?

Thanks for your time and help.

Have you checked that the mail you've generated is properly formed with correct headers etc.?  If you are using MercuryC to send the mail , I would turn on session logging  to find out what message is returned by your relay host.  Does it need authentication?

Re setup guides - if you google you may find a couple that were reported as being quite useful.

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the reply.  I turned on session logging (below) - does it mean anything to you? 

13:03:10.338: --- Sat May 12 13:03:10 2007 ---
13:03:10.338: Connect to 'bovianalyser.dyndns.org', timeout 30.
13:03:11.349: >> 220 localhost ESMTP server ready.<cr><lf>
13:03:11.349: << EHLO bovianalyser.dyndns.org<cr><lf>
13:03:11.359: >> 250-localhost Hello bovianalyser.dyndns.org; ESMTPs are:<cr><lf>
13:03:11.359: >> 250-TIME<cr><lf>
13:03:11.510: >> 250-SIZE 0<cr><lf>
13:03:11.520: >> 250-AUTH=LOGIN<cr><lf>
13:03:11.520: >> 250-AUTH CRAM-MD5 LOGIN<cr><lf>
13:03:11.520: >> 250 HELP<cr><lf>
13:03:11.520: << AUTH CRAM-MD5<cr><lf>
13:03:11.540: >> 334 PDY4ODUyMC4zNDZAbG9jYWxob3N0Pg==<cr><lf>
13:03:11.540: << Ym92aWFuYWx5c2VyIDQ1N2YzYjZiNjUxOWJkYzdhMmYyZTFjODk5MmE2ZDE5<cr><lf>
13:03:12.570: >> 235 Authentication successful.<cr><lf>
13:03:12.570: << MAIL FROM:<local@local> SIZE=436<cr><lf>
13:03:12.580: >> 250 Sender and size (436) OK - send RCPTs.<cr><lf>
13:03:12.580: << RCPT TO:<***********@gmail.com><cr><lf>
13:03:12.590: >> 250 Recipient OK - send RCPT or DATA.<cr><lf>
13:03:12.590: << DATA<cr><lf>
13:03:12.590: >> 354 OK, send data, end with CRLF.CRLF<cr><lf>
13:03:12.600: << Received: from Spooler by bovianalyser.dyndns.org (Mercury/32 v4.01b) ID MO000002;<cr><lf>  12 May 2007 13:03:12 +0100<cr><lf>
13:03:12.600: << Received: from spooler by localhost (Mercury/32 v4.01b); 12 May 2007 13:02:58 +0100<cr><lf>
13:03:12.600: << Received: from *machine name*.local (86.***.**.**) by localhost (Mercury/32 v4.01b) with ESMTP ID MG000001;<cr><lf>
13:03:12.600: <<    12 May 2007 13:02:57 +0100<cr><lf>
13:03:12.610: << Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 13:02:57 +0100<cr><lf>
13:03:12.610: << To: ***********@gmail.com<cr><lf>
13:03:12.610: << From: local<cr><lf>
13:03:12.610: << Reply-To: bovianalyser<cr><lf>
13:03:12.610: << Subject: Web Site Feedback<cr><lf>
13:03:12.610: << Message-ID: <A4EA34CE0@localhost><cr><lf>
13:03:12.610: << <cr><lf>
13:03:12.620: << Feedback from a user:<cr><lf>
13:03:12.620: << wow, int this good!<cr><lf>
13:03:12.620: << .<cr><lf>
13:03:12.820: >> 250 Data received OK.<cr><lf>
13:03:12.820: << QUIT<cr><lf>
13:03:12.830: >> 221 localhost Service closing channel.<cr><lf>
13:03:12.830: --- Connection closed normally at Sat May 12 13:03:12 2007. ---
13:03:12.840:

I actually get a bunch of these after each request to send an email (above is the first produced), they get longer (eg of the additions shown below) as Mecury pushes the email around:

13:08:04.250: << Received: from bovianalyser.dyndns.org (86.***.**.**) by localhost (Mercury/32 v4.01b) with ESMTP ID MG000005;<cr><lf>
13:08:04.250: <<    12 May 2007 13:03:44 +0100<cr><lf>
13:08:04.250: << Received: from Spooler by bovianalyser.dyndns.org (Mercury/32 v4.01b) ID MO000004;<cr><lf>
13:08:04.250: <<   12 May 2007 13:03:44 +0100<cr><lf>
13:08:04.250: << Received: from spooler by localhost (Mercury/32 v4.01b); 12 May 2007 13:03:20 +0100<cr><lf>
13:08:04.250: << Received: from bovianalyser.dyndns.org (86.***.**.**) by localhost (Mercury/32 v4.01b) with ESMTP ID MG000003;<cr><lf>
13:08:04.250: <<    12 May 2007 13:03:12 +0100<cr><lf>
13:08:04.260: << Received: from Spooler by bovianalyser.dyndns.org (Mercury/32 v4.01b) ID MO000002;<cr><lf>
13:08:04.260: <<   12 May 2007 13:03:12 +0100<cr><lf>
13:08:04.260: << Received: from spooler by localhost (Mercury/32 v4.01b); 12 May 2007 13:02:58 +0100<cr><lf>
13:08:04.260: << Received: from *machine name*.local (86.***.**.**) by localhost (Mercury/32 v4.01b) with ESMTP ID MG000001;<cr><lf>

I really appreciate your help. 

Looks like your MercuryC is not configured properly.  You should have the name of your provider's SMTP relay server in there.  If you don't have that facility, you could try sending directly with MercuryE, but using 'C' is preferable.

Rip out MercuryC and run MercuryE. In general config set internet name of this system to a domain that resolves, so that you can get postmaster@"realname" back to you if something happens.

You're also not mentioning if the web server is on the same server as Mercury? If not, it has to receive emails over SMTP, and for that you should enable MercuryS.

I can agree that a beginners guide to Mercury operations would be sweet.

Hey Peter,

Thanks for your comments.  I cottoned onto this this morning and am now running E.  I'm now able to use my development web site to send mail remotely - pretty cool.  The web server and the mercury server are one and the same although i'm not too worried about incoming mail - its more important that I can automatically generate outbound email to return the data to the user.  Having said that a site contact address would be useful...

 
I've noticed that both gmail and hotmail return my mail undelivered (gmail says i've sent too much spam?! and hotmail says i'm not formatted correctly) - would you know if this is because i've not formatted the headers properly (e.g. to RFC 2822 standard) or that my authentication is somehow going wrong?

Cheers,

 
Ben

 

It may be your 'helo' which is wrong.  What have you put as the system name?

You may find a full log will again be revealing.