INTRODUCTION
As someone who uses multiple ISP's and remote POP accounts for e-mail, I've run into a lot of little problems and tedium associated with managing all those POP servers and especially delivering mail with the existing anti-spam measures put in place by ISP's.
I've since found refuge in running my own local mailserver.
Now many end users, like myself initially, may say things like, 'Hey. Why should I run my own mailserver? Aren't mailservers for er, Servers and ISP's?' Words like 'complex' and 'techy' come to mind when thinking of running a mailserver. IOW's they're as intimidated as I was.
I put together these pages in an effort to allay your fears of running your own local mailserver and to introduce you to a very good mailserver, Mercury/32. It's fast, efficient, and it's free.
What can a mailserver like Mercury/32 do for me?
With a local SMTP server, I can deliver mail without having to use my local ISP's SMTP server. All mail is delivered directly to my recipients mail servers. I'm not bound by anti-spam measures that have been put in place so I can deliver mail completely free of concern about my From headers and which ISP I'm connected to. If a mail delivery is logged as successful then I know that the recipients mailserver has received the message and that it hasn't been lost or delayed in transit.
A local POP server allows you to create multiple local POP accounts from which your e-mail client/s may download mail. You can setup your mailserver to download mail from all your remote POP accounts and destribute all this mail to your local POP accounts in whatever way you wish. In this way, you can download all your mail to a single local POP account and then collect all this 'funnelled' mail using a single e-mail account. Even more interestingly, you can get your own domain and with use of free mail forwarding services offered by many domain hosts, create as many e-mail addresses as you like and have messages to all these addresses forwarded/delivered to a single remote POP account. You can then use your local POP server to distribute mail to each of these addresses to their own local POP accounts. Each e-mail address could be for each member of your family or business. Each member can then download mail to their own e-mail clients or accounts. This can save a lot of extra cost associated with paying for multiple remote POP accounts.
My intention is to outline, in a simple and easy to understand way, how to quickly configure Mercury/32 for either POP or SMTP services or both. The beauty of Mercury/32 is that it's modular so you can run only those services you want to. Mercury/32 is just a 1.5MB download and uses little system resources. It's compatible with all Win32 Windows versions. The following two documents outline how to configure your own POP and SMTP services using Mercury/32:
Once you're done with that, it would be useful to have your mail services start at boot-time.
Auto-starting Mercury/32 at boot time
To auto-start Mercury when your system boots, you'll need to create a shortcut in your system start up folder, for the Mercury Loader, using the '-m' parameter. For example, 'C:Mercuryloader.exe -m'. The '-m' parameter will minimize Mercury/32 on startup.
Running Mercury/32 as a service
If you wish to run Mercury/32 as a service there is no direct support for this in Mercury. However, this is still possible. For instructions on how to achieve this you can read the following articles:
The files that you'll need to create an NT Service as discussed in the above links may be downloaded here.
There's also the application/utility AtYourService, that will turn any DOS, Windows, Java application as well as batch file into a native Windows NT/2k/XP service. It's not freeware though.
Allie Martin
Why not write a tutorial for Shell-Shocked? Talk to me!
ravi