Mercury Mail Transport System - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Mercury Mail Transport System (Mercury MTS) is a standards-compliant donationware

Donationware

Donationware is a licensing model that supplies fully operational software to the user and pleads for an optional donation be paid to the programmer or a third-party beneficiary . The amount of the donation may also be stipulated by the author, or it may be left to the discretion of the user,...

(was freeware

Freeware

Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...

prior to January 2007) mail server developed by David Harris

David Harris (software developer)

David Harris is a software developer from Dunedin, New Zealand. He developed the Pegasus Mail client and the Mercury Mail Transport System, and is a former staff member of the University of Otago....

, who also develops the Pegasus Mail

Pegasus Mail

Pegasus Mail is a donationware , proprietary, email client that is developed and maintained by David Harris and his team. It was originally released in 1990 for internal and external mail on Netware networks with MS-DOS clients, and was subsequently ported to Microsoft Windows...

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

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

from Windows 98

Windows 98

Windows 98 is a graphical operating system by Microsoft. It is the second major release in the Windows 9x line of operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on 15 May 1998 and to retail on 25 June 1998. Windows 98 is the successor to Windows 95. Like its predecessor, it is a hybrid...

and Windows NT4 to the latest Windows Vista

Windows Vista

Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...

and Windows Server 2008 (Windows XP

Windows XP

Windows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...

or Windows Server 2003

Windows Server 2003

Windows Server 2003 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft, introduced on 24 April 2003. An updated version, Windows Server 2003 R2, was released to manufacturing on 6 December 2005...

are recommended). The other is a set of NetWare Loadable Modules (NLMs) which runs on all versions of the Novell NetWare

Novell NetWare

NetWare is a network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, with network protocols based on the archetypal Xerox Network Systems stack....

network operating system

Network operating system

A networking operating system , also referred to as the Dialoguer, is the software that runs on a server and enables the server to manage data, users, groups, security, applications, and other networking functions...

(NOS) from 3.x to 6.x (current ). 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

Eudora

Eudora may refer to:Places*Eudora, Arkansas, a city*Eudora, Kansas, a city*Eudora Township, Douglas County, Kansas*Eudora, Mississippi, an unincorporated community*Eudora, Missouri, an unincorporated community*217 Eudora, an asteroidOther...

or Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager from Microsoft, available both as a separate application as well as a part of the Microsoft Office suite...

. 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

Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Server is the server side of a client–server, collaborative application product developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Microsoft Servers line of server products and is used by enterprises using Microsoft infrastructure products...

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.

GrayWall, a graylisting interface from Lukas Gebauer
SpamHalter, Bayesian spam filtering
Bayesian spam filtering
Bayesian spam filtering is a statistical technique of e-mail filtering. It makes use of a naive Bayes classifier to identify spam e-mail.Bayesian classifiers work by correlating the use of tokens , with spam and non spam e-mails and then using Bayesian inference to calculate a probability that an...

from Lukas Gebauer
ClamWall virus
Computer virus
A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...

filter interface from Lukas Gebauer
Web Tools for Mercury/32 which enable web administration; by Rolf Lindby

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 http://www.pmail.com.

On 3 July 2009 Pegasus Mail 4.51 (final) and Mercury/32 v4.72 were released.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.