Page 12 - Mercury Manual.book

7 The Mercury Core Module
The “Mercury Core Module” Configuration menu option.

Note that in places in this manual, we may use the term Standalone Mode to describe a
copy of Mercury running with no LAN personality module selected.

• Configuring Pegasus Mail Mercury’s companion mail client, Pegasus Mail, has specific The latest versions of
support for Mercury that can be configured using this option. Pegasus Mail are always
available from our home
web site,
The “Mercury Core Module” Configuration menu http://www.pmail.com
option.

Choosing this option opens a dialog that allows you to configure many general aspects of the
core Mercury processing program. The dialog has seven different pages, each controlling a
different configuration area. The last of these, Policy, is covered separately in a later chapter,
while the remaining pages will be described here.

General note: in the descriptions that follow and in other sections of the manual where op-
tions are explained, you may see a word in brackets (parentheses to our American friends)
after the blue name of the configuration option: this is the keyword for the item in the appro-
priate section of MERCURY.INI that is equivalent to the option.

Options on the General page
Internet name for this system (myname) Enter here the Internet name for the machine on
which Mercury is running. Mercury will use this information when forming certain address-
es, such as the postmaster address. The name you enter here should be a fully-qualified do-
main name; if you are intending to use Mercury to provide mail services outside your
immediate organization, the name you provide will need to be advertised to the world by a
properly-configured Domain Name Server (DNS) system

Local mailbox directory path (newmail_path) This option is only meaningful if Mercury/32
is not using a Network Personality module (for example, MN_NW4.DLL, the personality mod-
ule for Novell NetWare 4.x and later); it tells Mercury/32 how to locate the directories for
each user on the system where new mail is to be stored. It should contain a full path (UNC
network paths are recommended) to a directory, and will usually contain one of two special
sequences – ~8, or ~N: these special sequences are called substitutions – Mercury/32 will re-
place them with either the user’s full username (for ~N) or with the first eight characters of
the user’s username (for ~8) when it is constructing the path. To illustrate how this works,
imagine that all your users have new mail folders as subdirectories of the directory D:\MAIL
on your computer, and you have entered D:\MAIL\~N in this field: when Mercury receives
mail for a user called BRIAN, it will replace the ~N with the user’s name, resulting in the path
D:\MAIL\BRIAN, which is presumed to be the proper directory for Brian’s new mail.

Time zone (timezone) Enter here the timezone for your site, expressed as a plus or minus dif-
ference from GMT. So, if you are in Los Angeles and are currently nine hours behind GMT,
you would enter -0900 in this field. Mercury will accept the so-called “vernacular” time zone
formats, such as PST and CST, but the use of these formats is no longer recommended on the
Internet and we strongly advise you to avoid them, since their use makes it difficult for some
mail programs to sort properly by date. In normal use, you should tick the control labelled
Auto, which tells Mercury/32 to ask your operating system for the proper timezone. If you
check the Auto button, any timezone you enter in the Timezone field is ignored.

Poll for new mail every x seconds (poll) This setting controls how often the core module
should check to see if there is mail waiting to be processed in the queue. For performance
reasons, we recommend that you do not set it below ten seconds.