Mercury/32 Mail Transport System 4.61

Messages sent by local users to the outside world are passed to Mercury, which then takes whatever steps are necessary to deliver them, removing the burden from the users workstation and allowing him to continue with other work.

Major Features:

The most important benefits of using a mail server to handle your mail are:

1. Centralization
   • All mail services can be centrally managed and controlled
2. Efficient use of resources
   • If you connect using a dialup connection, then only the mail server needs to be able to access that connection. Your workstations do not need their own modems or Internet accounts.
3. Continual availability
   • The mail server can continue processing mail even when the client workstations are turned off, allowing functions that depend on a continuously available service, such as automatic replies and autoforwarding.
   • Although integrated tightly with Pegasus Mail, Mercury is a fully independent product and can provide mail services to other mail programs, such as Eudora or Microsoft Outlook. Both versions of Mercury are highly modular, allowing you to install support for differing mixes of Internet protocols as required.
   • Mercury is extremely standards-compliant, supporting the all major Internet mail-related protocols. The Win32 version has special features designed for use in dialup environments. Both versions are extremely feature rich, with especially powerful support for managed mailing lists. Like any server product, Mercury is slightly more complex to install than a simple mail client, but only moderate experience with connecting to the Internet is required. Mercury is intended to be largely unobtrusive and needs little ongoing maintenance.

Enhancements:

• Queue overhaul The Mercury queueing mechanism (the part of the program responsible for managing the queue of incoming and outgoing mail) has been totally overhauled. The new version is anything up to 100 times faster at traversing the queue, which can have a really significant impact for sites that handle large quantities of mail. The visible face of this overhaul are the new queue indicators in the core module window these show the number of incoming and outgoing jobs in the queue at any time, and give you a general idea of the status of the queue in real time.
• Memory management overhaul Far and away the biggest, yet least visible change in v4.5 is the way it handles memory allocation internally. Previous versions of Mercury have had memory leak issues to varying levels, some of which have been very hard to track down: the new memory allocation architecture in v4.5 has made memory leaks both much less likely and trivially easy to locate and fix.
• Public folder delivery Mercury can now deliver directly into Pegasus Mail public folders, making this feature extremely powerful. Public folder delivery is handled by a new type of alias, and is easy to set up. Click here for more information.
• Disclaimer and text insertion rules An oft-requested feature for Mercury is the ability to add disclaimer text to outgoing messages v4.5 can do this and more using a new filtering rule action (meaning that you can insert text into both incoming and outgoing messages, and you can do so selectively). The process of inserting text into a mail message is actually surprisingly complex, but the code in Mercury is quite smart about it, handling all the most commonly-encountered situations. Click here for more information.
• Filtering rules for outgoing mail only You can now create filtering rules that are only applied to messages being sent outwards from the system. Primarily added in support of the new disclaimer addition rule (see above), this also allows you to fine-tune mail leaving your system.
• MercuryI IMAP server improvements The MercuryI IMAP server has been heavily overhauled to make it more robust and reliable. It now supports the IMAP AUTHENTICATE command and the use of a wide range of international characters in folder names (using the IMAP "modified UTF-7" encoding scheme). Performance should also be noticeably faster for many sites, especially those using IMAP-based web mail front ends such as SquirrelMail.
• SSL support in MercuryD and MercuryC The MercuryD POP3 client and MercuryC relaying SMTP client both now support SSL connections.
• Mercury Loader improved : This eliminates system down-time and reduces the likelihood of any loss of mail due to queue errors to vanishingly small levels.
• Delivery Status Notifications Mercury can now be instructed to send periodic status messages to message senders when their mail is delayed in the queue for whatever reason.
• Delivery failure reporting improvements The MercuryC and MercuryE SMTP modules now generate considerably better error reports when problems are encountered during mail delivery.
• Mailing list editor improvements The Mercury mailing list editor has been heavily improved to make it more reliable when used on heavily loaded systems. Some sites that previously reported periodic crashes when trying to edit lists in the Mercury GUI should now find these problems have gone. There are also new options to create new lists using an existing one as a template, and to adjust the order of moderators in a list.
• Content Control editor revised The Mercury Content Control editor can now handle rule sets of any size, and supports multi-level undo, find and replace and other standard text editing operations.
• SpamHalter and ClamWall included Lukas Gebauers proven SpamWall Bayesian Spam Filtering technology has been renamed SpamHalter, and is now included as a standard part of the Mercury distribution, as is his ClamWall anti-virus filter interface. 
• MercuryS deferred HELO processing Many sites may wish to use Mercurys market-leading transaction filtering capabilities to weed out unwanted connections, but still allow users with no choice of host to access the server. To do this, MercuryS now allows you to apply filtering to SMTP HELO/EHLO commands but defer the action until later: if the user subsequently issues a successful AUTH command before the action is taken, it is cancelled and the user is allowed normal access.
• Many changes to Daemon processing Mercurys Daemon (plugin) interface has been heavily extended with a wide range of new capabilities.