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Mercury Mail Transport System

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Mercury Mail Transport
Developer(s)David Harris
Stable release
4.74 / January 1, 2012 (2012-01-01)
Operating systemMicrosoft Windows
TypeE-mail server
LicenseDonationware
Websitehttp://www.pmail.com/

Mercury Mail Transport System (Mercury MTS) is a standards-compliant donationware (was freeware prior to January 2007) mail server developed by David Harris, who also develops the Pegasus Mail client.

There are two versions of Mercury with similar functionality. One, Mercury/32, is a Win32 application running on all 32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 98 and Windows NT4 to the latest (as of August 2009) Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 are recommended). The other is a set of NetWare Loadable Modules (NLMs) which runs on all versions of the Novell NetWare network operating system (NOS) from 3.x to 6.x (current as of August 2009). Either version can act as a mail server for a LAN; both have additional support for some NetWare LAN features.

Mercury is a fully independent mail server and can provide email services to all standards-compliant email clients, such as Eudora or Microsoft Outlook. Both versions of Mercury are highly modular, allowing support for different sets of Internet protocols to be installed as required. Mercury can also be installed tightly integrated with Pegasus Mail. The combination of Pegasus/Mercury is similar to the mail aspects of Microsoft Outlook/Microsoft Exchange Server. Mercury was originally developed to handle mail, both internal and external, on Netware servers in either bindery or NDS mode; Mercury ran on the system server, and integrated with Pegasus mail running on MS-DOS or Windows workstations.[1]

Features

Mercury is extremely standards-compliant, supporting all major Internet mail-related protocols including SMTP (for both sending and receiving mail), POP3 and IMAP. The Win32 version also supports a dialup connection. Both versions have many features, with especially powerful support for managed mailing lists. Mercury is intended to be largely unobtrusive and needs little ongoing maintenance.

The installation process is one of the most simple tasks. It takes less than a minute. After a few clicks, the software is installed and ready to be used. At this point, the user must indicate the domain parameter to be used. The user list is manually administered. There is no limit in numbers of users declared. A single directory holds users storage locations, so to do a backup just copy the "mail" directory and it will copy all users' data.

Also, a standard anti-virus could be used. After a mail is received, two files are created. When these files are finally written to disk, a simple antivirus engine could scan it. There is CLAMAV antivirus engine supplied, to be used as desired.

The software has an enormous variety of configurations. Using proper care, the server could be very secure. The relay control is very effective, and the ability to filter mails based in many rules, making it very efficient. Could use blacklist/whitelist technology. There are included tools to reduce spam effects.

Protocols supported

  • SMTP (server, relay-based client and full end-to-end delivery client)
  • POP3 (server and distributing client)
  • IMAP4rev1 (with multiple simultaneous access to the same mailbox)
  • PH (server, for directory lookups)
  • Finger (server, for directory lookups)
  • PopPass (server, for remote password changing)
  • HTTP (server, for web-based mailing list management)
  • SSL (Secure sockets layer) on SMTP, POP3 and IMAP servers
  • Mercury/32 4.73 can run as a MS Windows service

Extensions

Mercury/32, while not open source software, can be extended by anyone as the development documentation is free and publicly available at the pmail community. Below are some well known extensions, some bundled with Mercury/32.

Development status of Mercury Mail Transport System

On 19 June 2009 David Harris announced on the Pegasus Mail site that all development of Pegasus Mail and the associated Mercury program could only continue if sufficient users would commit to donating US$50 annually; on 21 July 2009 he said that there had been a good start [1].

New versions of both programs continued to be released; as of January 2012 the latest versions were dated in late December 2011.

In January 2015 Mercury 4.8pb (public beta) was released.

Version 4.80 is in essence a kind of "Version 5 dressed as version 4" release of Mercury. It has three major new features that were originally flagged as V5 features, but because they are all quite fundamental, in the end I decided that it was fairer to release them in a way that would allow current v4.x licensees to gain access to them without requiring a new license.

We will be releasing Mercury/32 v4.80 in two stages - the first being a public beta in January 2015, and the second being a full release at some time after that. The reason for the public beta is purely precautionary - the internal Mercury code has undergone huge changes in the last two years, and while it has been extensively tested and is in full production use at a large number of sites, I'd sooner ease it into full release just to make sure that there are no issues that slipped unnoticed past myself or my test team. We believe that the v4.80 public beta is as stable and reliable as any version of Mercury that has preceded it, and if you need the new features it offers, you should be able to install it with a high level of confidence.

The three major new features in v4.80 are: 

   OpenSSL support   All Mercury modules that support secure connections using SSL/TLS now use the industry-standard OpenSSL libraries to do so. Using OpenSSL means greater interoperability with other sites, and allows the use of fully-signed certificates - indeed, Mercury even provides an easy, step-by-step generation process to create the CSR requests needed to purchase or acquire such certificates from online Certification Authorities such as Thawte or Verisign.

   TCP/IP overhaul   The Mercury TCP/IP code, which is the core component that interacts with the Internet, has been totally overhauled. The main benefit of this comes with improved reliability and maintainability, which will make it easier to update the program in future - but you may also notice Mercury handling connections rather faster than in previous versions as well.

   Completely new help system   Back in the days of Vista, Microsoft ceased supporting the aging but functional WinHelp system, but failed to replace it with anything satisfactory (HTMLHelp, in particular, could not be used if the help file was installed on a shared volume, as Mercury frequently is). I finally completed my own help system in time to use it to host a completely reworked Mercury help file for this release. The new help system is up-to-date, consistently formatted, and much more usefully presented than the old version; it will also run properly no matter where Mercury is installed, or on what version of Windows it is running. The new system has a comprehensive table of contents and index, with free-text searching planned for the next release.

As well as these features, Mercury now includes a commandline utility called HS.EXE which can be used to locate messages matching almost any criteria very quickly and efficiently in directories containing large numbers of mail messages, such as spam repositories.

References

  1. ^ Internet mail: Another Internet gateway for Pegasus Mail -- Mercury. Mercury is an Internet/Novell mail gateway program that is designed to work in conjunction with Pegasus Mail ...
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