There is actually a third way as well but it involves you writing a program to process the mail.  You can setup multiple instances of Mercury/32 with neither MercuryC or MercuryE installed in the main system.  You then  write your own program to move the MO*.QCF/QDF file pairs from the main system queue to the various queues of the other Mercury/32 instances to actually send the mail.  Could be nothing more than a looping batch file that spreads the files to the share the outbound load.  Probably a lot more trouble that it's worth though. 

Is there any way of running multiple mercury/32 machines such that you can load balance them?  It's probably possible to just have two set up so that one is for sending and one for receiving, but I didn't know if you could actually set each machine up for both and do some load balancing?

Thanks in advance,

Gromit

The only way I can see to do that is to separate the domains on receiving when you have multiple domain.  The DNS would point each domain at a different IP address, both could be running against the same mailbox directories receiving the mail.  I did this with Mercury/32 and Mercury pointing at the same Netware system for years without problems.    The outbound messages could also be separated by domain as well; especially easy when sending via a SMTP e-mail client.

It this is only for a single domain I see no way to do this for inbound mail unless you are receiving via MercuryD.  You could setup the two system to download the mail at different times via MercuryX scheduling. 

As Thomas has said, you can run multiple Mercury installs pointing at the same mailstore.

The easiest "load balancing" method is to have one system for incoming mail only, and one for outgoing & client access.

You could use something like a round robin port redirecting NAT appliance to share out the (incoming) connections between multiple boxes on an internal network, but that is outside the scope of Mercury (which would work fine with it) and this forum.

I have tried this briefly with a router that said it supported it (just because it was there, not because I needed to) but the implementation was unreliable, so I went no further.

We do only have the one domain, and I was thinking of a round robin type of approach, which I think our firewall can actually handle.  There would be no issues setting it up with our mail relay provider (no DNS issues there since the mail all points to the provider, not us).  Otherwise, I can do the one for incoming, one for outgoing, I guess.  Just wanted to put it out there and see if anyone thought of other ideas that really worked.  Thanks very much for the input, it's been helpful!