Page 13 - Mercury Manual.book

The Mercury Core Module 8
The “Mercury Core Module” Configuration menu option.

Username of postmaster (postmaster) Every system capable of receiving Internet mail must
have a user called postmaster, to whom problem and status reports are sent. The postmaster
account is usually an alias to a real user on your system, and this is the expectation within
Mercury. Enter in this field the username of the user on the machine where Mercury is run-
Your postmaster alias
must refer to a valid local ning who is to act as your postmaster. While it is permissible to have a non-local address as
user on your system. Do your postmaster address, we strongly recommend that you do not do this, since it can create
not use a non-local ad-
dress here. real problems and mail loops when the remote machine is unreachable. This setting is man-
datory - Mercury cannot run properly without it.

For delivery failures return x lines of the message (returnlines) When Mercury cannot de-
liver a message to a local user for some reason, it will invoke a template file you provide for
delivery failures. One of the optional replacements that can be used in the delivery failure
template file is a special substitution that sends a certain number of lines from the failed mes-
sage. This configuration option controls how many lines of the message are returned when
the special partial return substitution is encountered.

Broadcast notifications for normal mail (broadcast) Mercury has special Network aware-
ness modules that allow it to take advantage of certain specific features of some local area
networks. One of the features that some networks (such as Novell NetWare) support is the
transmission of a single-line broadcast message that appears on the target user’s screen. If this
control is checked and you are running Mercury on a network that supports broadcast mes-
sages, Mercury will send a short message to users when new mail arrives for them.

Broadcast notifications for receipts (receipts) (See the preceding section for more detail)
This control determines whether Mercury should send broadcast messages advising the arriv-
al of mail messages that confirm reading or delivery.

Send copies of all errors to the postmaster (pm_notify) If this control is checked, Mercury
will send a copy of all error reports it generates to the local postmaster as well as to the orig-
inal sender of the message. This allows the postmaster the option of correcting addressing er-
rors and other simple problems.

Change file ownership to recipient (change_owner) As with broadcast notifications, some
Network systems support the idea of file ownership, usually to calculate disk space usage. If
your network supports this idea and this control is checked, then Mercury will attempt to
change the ownership of all the messages it delivers so that the actual recipient owns the file.

Suppress validation of From field when processing mail (gullible) Mercury usually attempts
to validate that the From field of all mail it delivers is legal. This can sometimes cause prob-
lems if you receive mail from sites that use broken or faulty mail programs; if this is the case,
you can suppress the validity test Mercury makes by checking this control.

Hard to quit If this control is checked, then Mercury will ignore any attempt to quit the pro-
gram: this prevents the server from being accidentally stopped when run on a public machine.
To quit from Mercury when this option is turned on, you must hold down the Ctrl key while
selecting Exit from the File menu.

Options on the Mail Queue page
Mercury stores mail messages it is processing in directories called Queues. All Mercury sys-
tems must have at least one queue, called the Primary Queue, which is where jobs reside as
they transit the system. The primary queue should always be located on a drive local to the
machine where Mercury is running if at all possible. If you place the primary queue on a re-