Thanks for the suggestion. We had a problem with an oversized PST at the same time, but the IMAP folder problem was common to all the users. I have just completed a test using Outllok Express and, unfortunately, there appears to be a 2GB limit on IMAP folders. This may not be entirely due to Mercury (v4.01a) but a Microsoft/Mercury combination - I have not tested with Thunderbird as yet. 

The test involved repeatedly copying one email with a 50MB attachment to a IMAP folder. This way the Outlook Express dbx files stayed small but the Mercury PMM file grew to over 2GB. Once over 2GB the emails began to become corrupted.

Many thanks for your help.  If anyone has a solution to this limitation I would appreciate knowing about it.

 Thanks

  Mike

On 17 Nov 2007 Pegasus Mail & Mercury - Automated Email <NoReply@praktit.se> wrote:

> I   am a consultant and would like to convince my clients of
>     the merits of Pegasus/Mercury over M$ products and have
>     just a few questions:   1. How does Mercury/32 for Windows
>     compare with MS Exchange. Where are there sample
>     configurations for at typical permanent T1 connection to
>     the Internet etc. and recommended settings. I have read
>     through some portion of the manual and not found them.

You can find them in the Mercury knowledgebase at http://kbase.pmail.gen.nz/mercury.cfm

>  
> 2. Does Mercury (server) store the user emails or does
>     Pegasus store it on the individual users PC. Is there an
>     option?

It stores the users mail on the server and can be accessed directly when used with Pegasus Mail.  You can also use IMAP4 to access this mail store with other email clients.

>  
> 3. Are there any limits to the number and size of the
>     emails. Can it store 50,000 emails for a given user with
>     say 15 gigabytes of data taken up by those 50,000 emails.

There is no limit but with the current foldering system if you store more than 32K of message in any one folder it really slows thing down.  I would never try to access this much mail via IMAP4 either.

>  
> 4. Can one purchases support calls to help
>     install/config. As a consultant in the USA clients will
>     pay for support, it is not an issue, but they will not
>     look favorably on a commercial product without readily
>     available support (email or phone) again clients will pay
>     for support/knowledge.  

You can buy support for Mercury. Checkout http://www.pmail.com/mlicense.htm

> 5.  How does Pegasus compare with Outlook Express and Outlook
>     2003 etc.

It's Pegasus Mail not Pegasus.  ;-)  A mail client is a very personal thing.  Comparing them is like comparing apples and oranges.  I've used both; supported both, as well as Thunderbird, Eudora and OE.  I much prefer Pegasus Mail but everyone is different so I've never tried to force a single email client on any organization.

Mr. Stephenson.

Thank you kindly for your response. Is there a file size limit i.e. like Outllook Express say 2 GByte. Can one folder have a 10 GByte mail store (folder). What is the underling database used by Pegasus Mail. Outlook uses Jet database.

What are the practical limits for Mercury/32 on a Windows server in terms of number of users, number of emails stored or the number of gigabytes stored. This is very important because todays business users believes as I do that having 3-5+ years of emails available at will is to be expeceted. These types of limits are viewed unfavorably given cheap CPU power and terabytes of online data storeage on the cheap..

Thank you again.

Peter

On 19 Nov 2007 Pegasus Mail & Mercury - Automated Email <NoReply@praktit.se> wrote:

> Mr. Stephenson.
>
> Thank you kindly for your response. Is there a file size
> limit i.e. like Outlook Express say 2 GByte. Can one folder
> have a 10 GByte mail store (folder). What is the underling
> database used by Pegasus Mail. Outlook uses Jet database.

Mercury/32 uses the Pegasus Mail folder system.  Each user has their own mail directory.  The new mail is simply RFC 2822 messages held in *.cnm files.   A Pegasus Mail 2.2 folder consists of two files. The master file has the extension .PMM: it has a 128-byte header of which the first 50 bytes are the long name of the folder, the remainder being reserved. Following the header is the text of all the messages in the folder, separated by ^Z characters (ASCII 26). Some of the messages stored in the folder may in fact be deleted  there is no way of determining this without consulting the record matching the message in the .PMI index file for the folder.  

The other file has the extension .PMI, and consists of a
representation of the message using a structure called an IMESSAGE, shown below in its C language definition (note that all integer values in the file are stored in Intel word order  Pegasus Mail for the Macintosh does whatever conversion is necessary for its Motorola processor as it loads each entry from the index):

typedef struct
{
unsigned long flags;
unsigned long fpos; /* Offset in master file */
WORD msg_number; /* Msg ordinal position */
char fname; /* Unused in folders */
char from [30]; /* Sender of message */
char subject [36]; /* Guess what this is */
char date [20]; /* Reduced form of date */
long mtime; /* See below */
long fsize; /* Bytes in this message */
} IMESSAGE;

There are limits to this system as defined by the OS. There are also practical limits of about 32K messages in any one folder.  Other than that the only limit to the mail store is that which is applied by the OS to the files allowed in a directory.

There is a new folder system being developed that is going to change this significantly.  According the David Harris it 95% complete and will have

*   No effective limits - multi-gigabyte folders with millions of
    messages will be possible. My design parameters for this work on
    the basis of a test platform with 10,000 folders, at least some of
    which must have more than 200,000 messages in them: this test
    mailbox, which would be well beyond the capacity of current
    versions of WinPMail and Mercury, will be developed before the
    code is written, and will be used as the testbed from day one.

>
> What are the practical limits for Mercury/32 on a Windows
> server in terms of number of users, number of emails stored
> or the number of gigabytes stored.

Hard to say.  I've been running this system for years in a business environment and I have mail stored from 1992.  I just looked at my archive on my home system and I have mail from 1998 when I started archiving the mail so each year has about 20K messages stored.  I generally ran small systems though, normally less than 100 users of Pegasus Mail and Mercury.  Normally on Netware but a number on Windows systems.

> This is very important because todays business users believes
> as I do that having 3-5+ years of emails available at will is
> to be expeceted. These types of limits are viewed unfavorably
> given cheap CPU power and terabytes of online data storeage on
> the cheap..

That may be true but users can go overboard on this storage. I've heard over and over from the mail system admins that no matter how much disk space was provided the users would use it all to store e-mail.  The people running the Lockheed corporate Exchange servers started putting limits on the mail stored on the server but then some users ran into problem with the inability to store this locally as well.  ;-)

I personally maintain about 1.5 GBytes of mail.  I can access this mail via the web using SquirrelMail and Mercury/32 but I do not open folders with more than about 5K messages unless I have plenty of time.  ;-)

>
> Thank you again.
>
> Peter
>

Mr. Stephenson,

I very much appreciate your detailed response. It is this kind of help that truly makes a software product shine. As you know many unknows become obviouse only after many months if not years of use. That is why I ask these questions.  David Harris understands these current limits and am happy to hear that changes are being made to make use of 100's of gigabytes of storage that is common today. Is there a time frame for the other 5% to be completed.

Thank you kindly.

Peter

Hi Everyone,

I have a customer that uses a Mecury server, as an IMAP server not POP, in conjunction with Outlook 2000 clients. This has worked very well enabling them to share large emails via IMAP folders rather than re-emailing large attachments to eachother. Recently they seem to have hit a limit on one folder in particlular which has 1340 messages stored in it and probably getting on for 2GB of storage space.

When any of the clients (there are only 3 users) drag a message to the folder concerned the email becomes corrupted - information is lost eg subject, attachments, main body. This does not occur with any other IMAP folders.

Mercury is running on a XP Pro machine with plenty of resources. The network is a 100Mb.

Any ideas/ suggestions?

Many thanks

  Mike
 

Please check the size of the .pst file. if near the 2gb mark the problem is with Outlook not Mecury.  The 2gb is a problem that is due to MS use of the Jet Engine for data storage, was not designed for large file pointers.

From the cmd prompt:

dir /s *.pst<ret>