AHA, Mr Stephenson, you ever bubbling fountain of knowledge.

I had been looking for this feature, but searches on "delay" and "schedule" came back fruitless. I was familiar with it in the old NOVEL day, but thought that it had fallen by the wayside since then.

This is just what I need to make it all work.

Many thanks

I hope that someone can give me some advice here:

I have Merc32 running on a Windows server connected to our permanent line to our ISP.

Once a week our PRO produces an email (in Pegasus) with an attached PDF newsletter which goes out to about 2000 subscribers. The net effect of this is that the mail server then spends the next 3-5 hours just delivering our newsletters, and internal mail, including scans from LAN scanners and faxes are delayed.

Our PRO cannot predict what time the message will be sent, cannot send the message after hours and she cannot leave her PC on and attached to the LAN, so I have to find a way to use Mercury to delay processing of that message until, say, 21h00.

Mercury is so fast, that writing a DOS script to continually scan for and remove the particular .101 file from the queue with take too much processing time and may fail, but I need to find a way to do this as transparently as possible. I have looked at Mercury's filtering rules and the options that MercuryX offers, but cannot find anything that can be useful here.

I really would like to keep the processing and delivery "in-house", but need to find some Mercury trick that will make this possible.

 Any ideas would be appreciated

There is no way to instruct Mercury to delay certain messages. I would probably install a second instance of Mercury and submit the messages that should be sent at a later time to this queue. Delivery can then be made according to schedule to the main Mercury instance using MercuryC and MercuryX. Or you could perhaps even have the second instance of Mercury doing parallel direct deliveries.

/Rolf

> I really would like to keep the processing and delivery "in-house", but need to find some Mercury trick that will make this possible.

You need to use the Pegasus Mail and Mercury function to delay the sending process until a specific time using the Deffered Message extension and the Mercury REMAIL function.

Deferred mailing, the mail server REMAIL command.

The mail server in Mercury 1.11 and later supports a new command - REMAIL.  

The Remail command allows a piece of mail to be submitted for sending at a future time and date: to enable it, you must have the line: notify : <path> in your Mercury.INI file - <path> must be a path to an existing directory anywhere on the server.  

In general, users should not be given any rights to this directory. The remail command must be either the last or the only command in the message submitted to the mail server. The format of the remail command is as follows:  

Remail yy-mm-dd hh:mm
<Message>

YY, MM, DD are the Year, Month and Day; HH and MM are the hour and minute. The message to be sent should begin on the line immediately following the Remail command, and must be a correctly-formatted, legal RFC822 message. The mail server will correctly expand CC and TO addresses in the submitted message at send time, but will not deal with BCC addresses.  

You can send also send mail to Mercury via SMTP and get it remailed. The body of the message sent to maiser@<your Mercury host> contains the message.  


Remail 08-6-12 8:55
From: stephens@bayarea.net
To: support@tstephenson.com
Subject: Test of deferred mail
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:49:00

Body of the message.

When running with Mercury and Pegasus Mail together then the Pegasus Mail  File | New message will contain the line "Compose deffered message" that works quite well.

Could you use an instance of Pegasus pointed at a queue folder that is NOT polled by Mercury?

Then a Sched Task or such to move the .101 into the live queue at a better time.