Re: [epub] Pegasus / Mercury

[Sheila King <sheila@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 18 Dec 2000 15:11:40 -0600, "Ray S. Whiting"
<rwhiting@bellsouth.net>  wrote about [epub] Pegasus / Mercury:

:Can you tell me more about Mercury?  I was under the impression it was
:supposed to go on the server (either a intranet, or a Web server), but I've
:just got my Win98 computer at home with a DSL connection, and then I connect
:to my mail at the virtual host.   Can Mercury run like that to deliver
:messages out to my twoscoops.com  virtual host with SMTP / POP3?

I'm running Mercury/32 on my home machine under Windows98 with a DSL
connection. Mercury IS a server. When you run Mercury on your computer
you have turned your computer into a mail server.

I don't know about delivering mail for a non-local domain, too much. I
have a virtual host where I host my thinkspot.net domain, but I use
their mail services for that domain. I registered a separate domain,
kserver.org, for my home computer and as far as Mercury is concerned,
that is the local domain.

Of course, you could deliver mail via Mercury for any domain that you
choose to allow. But, I would be wary of hosting my own POP3 server. One
of the things that you would need to do, in that case, is change the MX
records of the virtual host so that they point to your home computer.
Also, your machine would have to be always up (or you'd need a back up
mail server), and you would probably desire a dedicated IP address,
rather than the dynamically allocated one that most ISPs provide their
end users with. (I have the dynamic IP, and it creates additional things
I have to watch out for...I wouldn't recommend to anyone to go with
hosting their own full-fledged mail SMTP/POP3 server under these
conditions.)

The set up I have at home is fairly advanced. I have registered my own
domain name for the home computer and manage my own DNS record for that
domain. This isn't what I was suggesting to others here on this list. I
think you can run Mercury much more simply, without registering a domain
name, and without messing around with DNS records and MX records. You
would set it up to relay to your "real" SMTP server, and just use
Mercury for sending the outbound mail. You would set your mail reader
program to use the "local host" as the SMTP server. This would send your
mail messages to your local copy of Mercury, which would then relay the
messages to your SMTP server for your domain. Obviously, in this case,
you need a SMTP server that is going to accept mail in the types of
quantities that one sends when they host a list, but you must already
have that if you are hosting a list already. It is possible to set
Mercury to deliver directly to the recipients machine, but this in
effect makes YOU the postmaster of your own mail server, and means you
get to handle all the bounce messages and error messages yourself. Not
for the faint-of-heart.

I don't know if this response is at all clear. I feel like I'm rambling
incoherently. Please feel free to follow up with additional questions.
Maybe that would help to focus me on specifics.


--
Sheila King
http://www.thinkspot.net/sheila/
http://www.k12groups.org/


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