Given that your ISP blocks port 80 it is highly likely they also block 25 so SMTP receiving might be problematic (unless zonedit can do a similar port redirect as your web server).

Probably your best move would be to continue with your current forwarding of all domain mails to your account and have MercuryD (POP3 distributing client) retrieve all mail from this account and sort it to each user you set up. You will also need to set up a user for youself and get your personal mail from Mercury. This user would need to be the 'default user' for the POP3 definition so you get ALL mail that is not recognised as belonging to another user.

You can test this without changing your DNS in any way, just make sure you have the default user set before downloading via POP3, as MercD will discard any mail it cannot find a user to deliver to.

Presumably port 110 is not blocked, so your external users will just need to setup their POP3 clients with your server address and the username & pw you assign.

Hi:

   I am building a website for our Senior's complex in Mesa, Arizona.  However, I'm now in Canada for the Summer.  I'm doing this as a member of this Senior's Park as a public service. The website is www.mesaeastpark.com.

   I'm a 'primitive' website builder. My expertise is in databased business applications.

   I have on my 'server' machine here in Canada (which I drive back and forth between U.S. and Canada): an Apache Web Server, an FTP Server, and a News Server. All of these systems work correctly.

   Now, the 'directors' at my 'Park' would like me to have me set up an email 'Server', where there would not be too many people using it (perhaps 15 or so). The 'office' clerk would like to receive email as 'office@mesaeastpark.com', etc, etc 

   I have just 'installed' Mercury on my Dell Pentium 4 2-GB machine, and made a shortcut to the Mercury Loader.  When it activates, I get a zillion little popups that show up. They 'scare' me :)) 

Question:

   Is Mercury the proper vehicle for my Park's purposes ?  (or am I really out of my depth hetre ??)

 -Mel Smith

   I have just 'installed' Mercury on my Dell Pentium 4 2-GB machine, and made a shortcut to the Mercury Loader.  When it activates, I get a zillion little popups that show up. They 'scare' me :)) 

Question:

   Is Mercury the proper vehicle for my Park's purposes ?  (or am I really out of my depth here ??)

The Mercury/32 server is a fine mail server and one of the easiest to setup an manage.  The real question is how do you intend to use it and what is the domain name/IP address of the mail server.  The domain mesaeastpark.com does not exist and www.mesaeastpark.com only exists as a CNAME for wfb.zoneedit.com

The first thing you need to do is get the domain mesaeastpark.com registered in the DNS and preferably with a MX record pointing to the IP address of the Mercury/32 host.  It could also just have a separate MX host that either does a store and forward of goes to a "domain" mailbox that is services via POP3 by Mercury's  MercuryD.

[quote user="Thomas R. Stephenson"]

The Mercury/32 server is a fine mail server and one of the easiest to setup an manage.  The real question is how do you intend to use it and what is the domain name/IP address of the mail server.  The domain mesaeastpark.com does not exist and www.mesaeastpark.com only exists as a CNAME for wfb.zoneedit.com

Thomas:

   Your response above is startling !  I visit www.measaeastpark.com  multi times per day. Altho my site is only visited by outsiders perhaps 3 -10 times per day (right now), it *has* been visited from all over the world ???

   Just a moment ago, I visited again.  And you're correct, I use www.zoneedit.com to translate my www.whosaway.com to another port that allows entrance to a specific port on my router to my 'web'  machine thru my windows firewall.

  How I wish to use Mercury (when I finally come to understand it): A limited number of people in our Senior Park (1800 miles south of me right now) (starrting with two office people) should be able to be reachable at the address office@mesaeastpark.com. Currently, zoneedit has it set up that *all* emails to xxxx@measeastpark.com are forwarded to my personal email account (which I want to change using Mercury). I want *those* people to be able to conduct their Park-related activities thru emails to each other . The office itself has never even *had* an email -- just a phone number.

 The first thing you need to do is get the domain mesaeastpark.com registered in the DNS and preferably with a MX record pointing to the IP address of the Mercury/32 host.  It could also just have a separate MX host that either does a store and forward of goes to a "domain" mailbox that is services via POP3 by Mercury's  MercuryD.

   I have owned the name www.mesaeastpark.com for several months now. DNS is setup for them to translate it to a specific port on my D-Link router 'fronting' the three machines on my local network (all Win XP Pro boxes).

   So, setting the MX record to *my* MX record is apparently already completed, because (as noted above), email to  ???@mesaeastpark.com *does* arrive at my personal email account at an ISP in Arizona, then I can access that thru OE

 Have I confused the issue further :((

-Mel Smith

[/quote]

Hi again:

   In the previous post I mistakenly used the website name www.whosaway.com.  That is a dead site that I worked on for a week or so months ago but gave up on. 

    I intended to write: www.measeastpark.com

Sorry !

-Mel Smith

Your response above is startling !  I visit www.measaeastpark.com 

multi times per day. Altho my site is only visited by

outsiders perhaps 3 -10 times per day (right now), it *has* been

visited from all over the world ???

Just a moment ago, I visited again.  And you're correct, I use www.zoneedit.com to translate my www.whosaway.com to another port that allows entrance to a specific port on my router to my 'web'  machine thru my windows firewall.

Ok, so this gets translated at zoneedit to the IP address of your host.  

  How I wish to use Mercury (when I finally come to understand it):

A limited number of people in our Senior Park (1800 miles south of me

right now) (starrting with two office people) should be able to be

reachable at the address office@mesaeastpark.com. Currently, zoneedit has it set up that *all* emails to xxxx@measeastpark.com

are forwarded to my personal email account (which I want to change

using Mercury). I want *those* people to be able to conduct their

Park-related activities thru emails to each other . The office itself

has never even *had* an email -- just a phone number.

Ok, so office@mesaeastpark.com comes into your POP3 mail account someplace.  Could this be setup to be forwarded not to your POP3 account but via SMTP to your system?   If so all you need to do is setup Mercury/32 on your server and forward port 25 at the router to the system running Mercury/32.   This would mean that the domain would be serviced by Mercury/32 and the paople at the park could come in via POP3/IMAP4 to get the mail and also send through your server.

So, setting the MX record to *my* MX record is apparently already completed, because (as noted above), email to  ???@mesaeastpark.com *does* arrive at my personal email account at an ISP in Arizona, then I can access that thru OE

Yes the MX records are in place.There is no A record but there are MX records.  There was a typo in the name i first checked.

 Answer Section:
    mesaeastpark.com, MX, 0, mail6.zoneedit.com
    mesaeastpark.com, MX, 0, mail7.zoneedit.com

 Have I confused the issue further :((

Somewhat, I'm still not real sure about the setup. 

For example, with my setup I own (rent) a number of domains and they all come to the same IP address where I have a Mercury gateway server running.  tstephenson.com, linux-tstephenson.com, Novell-tstephenson.com, merwin-dyndsn.com, xampp.from-ca.com, etc.  Some are handled by "domain" mailboxes, other by daemons forwarding the mail, some delivered directly.  In all cases these domains are hosted by their own mail server someplace on my system. I also have multiple Webmail setups pointing at the various internal servers so that I can come in via a browser (Apache/PHP/SquirrelMail/IMAP&SMTP to Mercury) to send/receive mail.  It's not really "rocket science" but it does get a little tricky working this all out.

The way you want the people at the park to get the mail depends a lot on how you want it done.  I personally recommend that you host the service and they would be using their email client to get the mail via POP3 from the mercury/32 host and send the mail via your Mercury/32 SMTP host as well.

[quote user="Mel Smith"]I use www.zoneedit.com to translate my www.whosaway.com to another port that allows entrance to a specific port on my router to my 'web'  machine thru my windows firewall.[/quote]

Any reason you can't just open port 80?

[quote]Currently, zoneedit has it set up that *all* emails to xxxx@measeastpark.com are forwarded to my personal email account (which I want to change using Mercury).[/quote]

You will probably want to set up an A record for mail.mesaeastpark.com, pointing to your IP address, so that your users won't have to enter your IP address in their clients.

You then need to get your DNS provider to point the MX record at mail.mesaeastpark.com rather than their mail server.

Thomas & Christchurch;

   Thanks for both your replies.  I will digest them over this Easter Weekend, and try to do more studying on Mercury/32 over the next few days.

   (btw, I don't use Port 80 for my www work because of restrictions by my ISP suppliers (in Canada and in Arizona) abour running websites on a residential account. I have my host/server sitting on the desk beside me, and it stays on day and night. I also have my development machine and my wife's Dell Laptop on this same local network with me)

   Anyway, it is the setting up of Mercury that I don't understand. I have it installed, but that is as far as I've gotten so far. 

   What do I do next to set up email addresses -- or what should I read *first* in the help files please ?

 Thanks again for you help !

-Mel Smith

[quote user="Mel Smith"]Thomas & Christchurch;

   Thanks for both your replies.  I will digest them over this Easter Weekend, and try to do more studying on Mercury/32 over the next few days.

   (btw, I don't use Port 80 for my www work because of restrictions by my ISP suppliers (in Canada and in Arizona) abour running websites on a residential account. I have my host/server sitting on the desk beside me, and it stays on day and night. I also have my development machine and my wife's Dell Laptop on this same local network with me)

Yes, but do you have a fixed IP address and host name assigned to this host/server system?   Could you assign the domain mesaeastpark.com to this IP address?  assign this host name as the primary MX host?  We could provide a lot more specific help if we knew more specifically how you are setup. 

   Anyway, it is the setting up of Mercury that I don't understand. I have it installed, but that is as far as I've gotten so far.

We know how to setup Mercury but we do not have enough specific info as to your setup to tell you how to do it.  We do not know if you can receive SMTP mail on port 25 or maybe have to download mail from some POP3 "domain" mailbox hosted someplace else. We need specifics as to what you can do with the routing of the domain.  For example I own the domain tstephenson.com (mail.tstephenson.com) registered through GoDaddy.  I have the fixed IP address 209.128.92.2 assigned by my ISP BayArea.net.  Bayarea.net also provides backup MX services.  Here's what shows in the DNS.

    tstephenson.com, A, 209.128.94.2
    tstephenson.com, MX, 20, mailrelay.bayarea.net
    tstephenson.com, MX, 30, mail.tstephenson.com
    tstephenson.com, MX, 10, mail.tstephenson.com

The Mercury Configuration | Mercury core "Internet name for this system" is tstephenson.com and local server I call "stephens".  The domain setup in mercury.ini is

 [Domains]
stephens: stephens
stephens: [209.128.94.2]
stephens: mail.tstephenson.com
stephens: tstephenson.com
stephens: [192.168.1.2]
dm=merwin: merwin-tstephenson.com
dm=ubunto: linux-tstephenson.com
stephens: dyndns-tstephenson.dyndns.org
dm=merwin: merwin.dyndns.org
daemon:c:\mercury\mercfwd.dll;[192.168.1.3]: novell-tstephenson.com
daemon:c:\mercury\mercfwd.dll;[192.168.1.153]: xampp.from-ca.com

There are a lot of other domains that are also registered to this same IP address and they are either sent to a domain mailbox (dm=) or handled by a SMTP forwarding daemon (daemon:) to other IP addresses on my local network.

   What do I do next to set up email addresses -- or what should I read *first* in the help files please ?

You create users using Configuration | Manage local users.  The users will receive mail when a local domain matches one in the domains lint and the local username.  For example if you have the domain mesaeastpark.com in the domains listing and a user admin mail received by mercury for admin@mesaeastpark.com will be delivered to the directory associated with admin.  A basic setup when using Mercury will have the users mail directory (Configuration | Mercury core | Local mailbox directory path) pointing to c:\mercury\mail\~n  and the user admin would have a directory c:\mercury\mail\admin.

The setup of the domains is the most critical part of the setup.  If you are receiving mail via SMTP to Mercury for mesaeastpark.com then the domains setion of the mercury.ini file should look like:

[Domains]
;server : domain
mesaeastpark : mesaeastpark
mesaeastpark : mesaeastpark.com
mesaeastpark : [<router IP address>]
mesaeastpark : [<local LAN IP address>]

The last two are there so you can receive literal addresses like admin@[<ip address>]

 Thanks again for you help !

-Mel Smith[/quote]