Mercury:Installation

From WikiPmail

Installing Mercury/32 to match your specific needs

Mercury is to e-mail what chameleons are to forests - it can blend into almost any environment. In this section, we'll describe some typical scenarios encountered by people wanting to set up mail servers in their environments, and show you what combination of Mercury features and protocol modules can be used to satisfy those scenarios. To use this section, read through the scenarios until you find one that looks like it might match your needs, then click on the link next to it.

• Scenario 1 site is permanently connected to the Internet using a high-speed link such as a T1 or T3 leased line and you have control over your DNS (Internet Name Server) entries.

• Scenario 2 site is connected to the internet via a dialup connection, and your Internet Service Provider (ISP) receives mail on your behalf, storing it in either one POP3 mailbox per user, or a single POP3 mailbox for all your users (a so-called "domain mailbox").

• Scenario 3 are on a local area network where all Internet access is channeled through a specialized system such as a firewall or proxy server - you do not directly connect to the Internet yourself.

• Scenario 4 have an ADSL or cable modem servicing your computer or network, but your ISP won't supply static IP addressing, or implements restrictions on outgoing mail connections ("port 25 blocking").

Installation overview

Installing Mercury is a fairly simple process of answering a few questions for the setup program, after which it will copy the necessary files to your computer and create a basic working configuration for you. This section of the help file aims to help you prepare for installation by explaining what the setup program is going to ask, why it wants to know, and how you can decide what the best answers are.

Step1: New installation, or update?

The first thing setup will ask you is whether you want to do a new installation of Mercury, or whether it should update an existing installation. If you choose the update option, all your existing settings and template files will be preserved - only the actual program files for Mercury will be updated.

If you perform an update instead of a new installation, the setup process essentially ends at this point - Setup will simply perform the necessary modifications and will then exit.

Step 2: Choosing an operating mode

If you chose a new installation at step 1, Mercury will ask you whether or not you want to install its special support for Novell NetWare local area networks. There are three choices at this point - installation in NetWare Bindery mode, installation in NetWare NDS mode, or no NetWare-specific module.

• NetWare Bindery mode is suitable for NetWare 3.x file servers and in some cases for NetWare 4 and later versions, although we do not normally recommend the use of Bindery mode on NDS-based servers.

• NetWare NDS mode is suitable for NetWare 4.x, 5.x and 6.x file servers. Some extra configuration is required using the Pegasus Mail NCONFIG utility (which is provided with Mercury/32 for this purpose). NCONFIG is used to create user mailboxes on the file server.

• No NetWare support: this option is suitable for any environment - you can even use it when you have a NetWare-based LAN if you want more specific control over mailbox location and setup. You will typically select this option if you are installing Mercury on a Windows peer-to-peer or NT-based network, or on a single computer.

Step 3: Where to install Mercury/32

The next step simply involves telling Setup where it should actually place the Mercury/32 program files. You can choose any directory for this, although normally it is best to install Mercury/32 onto the hard drive of the machine where it actually runs (as opposed to installing it on a file server): doing this can prevent problems if your file server crashes at any point while Mercury is running.

Step 4: Selecting protocol modules and SMTP client

The next two questions involve choosing the protocol modules that Mercury should activate by default when Mercury runs. You should read the section of this help file entitled Installing Mercury/32 to match your specific needs before attempting to make this choice. Note that these questions only determine which protocol modules Mercury will load by default - all the available protocol modules are installed as part of the setup process, and any that you do not choose to enable at this point in the process can be enabled at any later time using the Protocol Modules option on the Mercury Configuration menu.

Step 5: Entering basic configuration information

Setup will now ask you for either two or three pieces of configuration information:

This machine's internet domain name You should simply enter whatever internet domain name has been assigned for this machine. Problems with the Windows TCP/IP networking layer mean that Mercury cannot always work this information out reliably by itself. Mercury uses this name when it constructs addresses like the postmaster address for your system, and setup will automatically create an entry in the Mercury configuration file telling it to regard this as a "local domain" - that is, one where Mercury is the point of final delivery.

Username for postmaster All mail-enabled Internet systems must have a special reserved user called postmaster: rather than forcing you to create a user called postmaster, Mercury simply treats the address as a specialized alias for a user on your system. Enter here the name of the user to whom postmaster mail should be directed. If you are running in NetWare NDS or Bindery mode, then this is the full username of the user (in NDS mode, you must express the username relative to the root of your NDS tree in the standard dotted notation). In non-NetWare mode, this is any valid mailbox name you subsequently create within Mercury or in Pegasus Mail. The user need not actually exist at setup time.

If you chose the MercuryC relay-based SMTP client at step 4, setup will also ask you for the name of a host to which MercuryC should connect when sending mail: enter the full domain name of the machine running the SMTP server that is going to send mail on your behalf (you can enter an IP address here as well, if you wish - this is sometimes necessary if you are installing Mercury behind a firewall or proxy server).

Step 6: Selecting a relaying mode

If you chose to load the MercuryS SMTP server at step 4, setup will now ask you what default relaying protections you want to enable. Relaying refers to the practice where a mail server accepts and forwards mail that is not addressed to any local users on its system. When you send a message using an SMTP-based mail client like Pegasus Mail or Eudora, you are relaying mail. Unfortunately, relaying has been abused in recent years by people sending unsolicited commercial e-mail, and most sites now find it necessary to place more or less strict controls on how their server may be used for relaying.

There are three possible answers to this question:

No relaying controls In this mode, MercuryS will act as an open relay. We strongly advise against selecting this mode unless Mercury is only operating on an intranet. It is considered very bad form to have an open relay on a mail server that is actually open to the Internet proper.

Normal relaying controls In this mode, Mercury will only relay mail if the sender's address is a valid local address on the system other than "postmaster". This mode prevents the majority of relaying abuse, but requires no ongoing maintenance. We recommend this mode in most cases.

Strict relaying controls In this mode, Mercury will only relay mail if the sender's e-mail address is a valid local address and the IP address of the machine from which the message is being sent has been explicitly approved by the system administrator using a connection control entry. This mode practically eliminates all possibility of relaying abuse, but requires more ongoing maintenance, especially if you have roving or remote users.

Step 7: Choosing a mail queue location

Mercury uses a directory on your computer to store mail as it processes it. The queue is also typically the location where local e-mail clients like Pegasus Mail can place mail for processing by Mercury.

If you are using Pegasus Mail, then you will typically enter a queue directory that exists on a shared volume accessible by your Pegasus Mail users. This will allow their copies of Pegasus Mail to submit messages to Mercury for processing simply by placing a file in the queue directory.

If you are not using Pegasus Mail, then it is usually best to enter a directory on the local hard drive of the computer where Mercury is being installed: this provides the best performance and some extra security.

Note that if you wish, you can install the queue on the local hard disk, then later tell Mercury to retrieve mail submitted by your Pegasus Mail users from a secondary queue. This can offer some extra protection from server crashes or network downtime, since Mercury will still be able to accept incoming mail during the outage. Please consult the main Mercury help file for more information on setting up secondary queues.

.... And finally, it's show time.

That's it. If you've successfully navigated the setup process to this point, all you need to do is click the Install Mercury/32 button and Setup will do the rest. After the program is installed, run Mercury by selecting its icon in the Windows Start menu, and explore the program's Configuration menu for fine-tuning options. And remember, Mercury has comprehensive online help - if in doubt, look on the Help menu for assistance.

Uninstalling

The Mercury installer is a file copy process. Mercury does also not register itself as an installed software under Windows. Therefore there exists no uninstaller for Mercury.

Uninstalling Mercury Service

You use the standard Windows commandline SC to uninstall each Mercury Windows Service instance that you have installed. The example below assumes you named the service Mercury32.

C:\> SC DELETE MERCURY32

Remove Mercury

In order to uninstall Mercury/32 from your machine, simply delete the shortcuts from the windows start-menu and also delete the entire Mercury Directory. There is nothing in the Windows Registry to remove.