The reason is sounds technical is probably that it is rather technical... ;)

It's perhaps best to take it step by step.

Transferring email on the Internet requires port 25. So the first thing to do is to make sure that the device you use to connect to the Internet (DSL modem, router or whatever) has port 25 open, and that any incoming traffic on port 25 is redirected from there to port 25 on the server running Mercury. Make sure there is no firewall program on the Mercury server that blocks port 25.

To send an email you set the SMTP server in your email program to the IP address of the Mercury server. If you run the email client on the same computer as Mercury you should set it to localhost or 127.0.0.1 (which is the same thing). Your email is then received by the SMTP server module in Mercury, and sent to non-local recipients via the SMTP client module (either MercuryE or MercuryC).

To receive an email from someone via the Internet you need to make the public IP address for the mail server handling your domain known to the world. To do this you add a MX record to the DNS information for your domain, containing the hostname of the server. This could be mail.myownserver.info. You will then need an additional A record that gives the IP address for that hostname (which you have, IP is 76.125.92.139).

The MX records for myownserver.info now point to mail6.zoneedit.com and mail7.zoneedit.com, which presumably is not what you want, so you need to change that.

I'm not able to connect to port 25 on 76.125.92.139 at present, so that's another thing you need to check on.

/Rolf
 

Hi there,

I'm new to personal web hosting and so far I've managed to figure out creating and maintaining my own web server with multiple domains and running an FTP server.  So the next thing for me to do was to figure out how to run my own email server too.  Unfortunately it hasn't been something I've managed to figure out and it doesn't help not knowing hardly anything about it.

 My first glance at Mercury /32 was down right intimidating.  That one window poped up with the four others inside and I freaked out.  Not only do I not know anything about it, but it's got 4 windows and they all want something surely, right?

 Well I sat down and spent some hours messing with it and I've got a much better idea of how it works.  (basic sending/recieving email).  The only problem is, I can do neither and I'm not quite sure what I'm missing.  So let me go ahead and explain my installation steps and what I'm trying to do.

Installation was pretty straight forward.

New installation, No NetWare Support,  No Pegasus Mail intergration, Mercury S, Mercury D, and Mercury E installed.

 For the machine's internet domain name, I entered "myownserver.info".  This is a domain name I purchased and I'm using Zoneedit as the DNS server to point the domain to my IP address.  All myownserver.info, mail.myownserver.info, and www.myownserver.info are directed to my IP.

For the username, I just leave it at Admin. For SMTP relaying mode, I chose "Normal".  I don't add any third-party stuff and finish the install.

 
Configuration settings:

 After launching Mercury/32, I only change the following.

I go to MercuryE SMTP Client Configuration and enter my router's IP address 192.168.1.1 since it's the DHCP provider to my computers in the network.  My computer is 192.168.1.128.  I've tried other values here, but I will get an MX error about how it can't resolve host name.

I leave everything else as is in this menu and click save.

 I go to "Manage Local Users" and set up a new user and password, then close that out.

Now I go into Microsoft Outlook and enter the information to the mail server.  It runs the test send and receive and it goes fine.

Next, I try to send a test email to either my yahoo account or hotmail account.  This is where the problem is seen.

I click send, and I see it go through the processes in the modules.  But when it gets to MercuryE,  It goes no further.  Here's what the log looks like:

Begin processing job MO0014C8 from david@myownserver.info
  Resolved MX for 'hotmail.com' to 65.64.244.168
Error connecting to primary server '65.54.244.168'.
 Error connecting to alternate server '65.54.245.104'.
Error connecting to alternate server '65.54.245.8'.
Error connecting to alternate server '65.54.245.72'.
Processing of job MO0014C8 incomplete or failed.
Job MO0014C8 processing complete.

 No matter what I try, it just won't send.  And I haven't even began to try and figure out why incoming test emails aren't working.  I don't get any return errrors or anything like that. 

Now what I'm guessing is I've got something slightly off on my server names or the  MercuryE SMTP Client Configuration settings.

Does anyone have any ideas on this?  I haven't changed any of the other settings but the ones listed here and I have ports 110 and 25 properly forwarded to my computer.  I tried on two seperate computers too, one Vista and one Server 2003.

Thanks in advance.

DNS lookup seems to work but something is blocking the SMTP connection to hotmail. If could be a firewall, but the most likely reason is that your Internet service provider has blocked outgoing traffic on port 25 (in an attempt to stop spam). In that case you can use MercuryC instead of MercuryE and relay via your ISPs SMTP server, or you could try contacting your ISP and convince them to open port 25 for you.

/Rolf 

Begin processing job MO0014C8 from david@myownserver.info
  Resolved MX for 'hotmail.com' to 65.64.244.168
Error connecting to primary server '65.54.244.168'.
 Error connecting to alternate server '65.54.245.104'.
Error connecting to alternate server '65.54.245.8'.
Error connecting to alternate server '65.54.245.72'.
Processing of job MO0014C8 incomplete or failed.
Job MO0014C8 processing complete.

 No

matter what I try, it just won't send.  And I haven't even began to try

and figure out why incoming test emails aren't working.  I don't get

any return errors or anything like that. 

You also could try turning on the MercuryE session logging to see exactly what message MercuryE  is getting back from the MX hosts.  You can also try sending to techsupp@tstephenson.com since I do not block hosts based in their IP address being randomly assigned, hotmail does.  But I agree with Rolf, I suspect the real problem is port 25 blocking.

Ok,

I contacted my ISP after getting irritated with it and they said they only block port 25 if there's been bulk emails or spamming done from that individual.  They informed me to try the alternate port 587, but no luck there.  I did some more research and found supposedly port 2525 was also another known port?  No luck either.

 In regards to my settings above, am I doing that part right?  

Now I also created the subdomain mail.myownserver.info and pointed it at my IP address using a DNS service called Zoneedit.com, but I'm not quite sure how this is suppose to be used or where it goes in the settings.

 Half of what's making it frustrating is I'm not grasping what connections it needs to make to connect to the WAN.  What I mean by that is what part needs to connect to localhost or 127.0.0.1, what needs to be set so it "listens" to mail comming in at alias@myownserver.info, and how does it establish an external connection to the recipient server and what must be in place for it to do so?  And what settings specifically define these?

Once I can understand that, it'd made troubleshooting far easier because I'd have a better idea of how the connections are suppose to work and what settings I should tinker with to try and figure out where the problem is at.

I'm really quite new to email and how it functions.  I've used it, both using Outlook and using free services like hotmail, but I never have looked into how they actually function til now and it's hard for me to grasp because most people use a bunch of technical jargan only MIT graduates can decode.