Page 18 - Mercury Manual.book

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

Alias database file (aliasfile) The location and name of the file in which your system aliases
are stored. Mercury will create this file as required – it need not exist.

Synonym database file (synfile) Synonyms are a specialised form of alias used in conjunction
with the Pegasus Mail system to provide alternative addressing formats on your system. If
you have created synonyms on your system using the Pegasus Mail PMGRANT utility, you will
need to use the CH_SYN.EXE utility supplied with Mercury to build a synonym database for
Mercury, and enter the name and location of that file here. (note that if running in NDS mode,
you will use the NDS-aware synonym builder NSYNONYM.EXE instead).

Delivery confirmation template (confirmfile) The name and location of a template file that
Mercury should use when reporting confirmation of delivery. This is the file that will be ed- If you leave this field
blank, Mercury will not
ited when you choose Delivery confirmation from the Template files submenu of the Config- respond to requests for
uration menu. confirmation of delivery.

Delivery failure template (failfile) The name and location of a template file that Mercury
should use when reporting delivery failures. This is the file that will be edited when you
choose Delivery failure from the Template files submenu of the Configuration menu.

System log file (logfile) The name and location of a file into which Mercury should store in-
formation about the jobs it processes. If this entry is left empty, Mercury will not perform any
logging.

Directory for noticeboards (noticeboards) If you have created a noticeboard system within
Pegasus Mail, Mercury can delivery mail to it. Enter the top directory in your noticeboard
structure here (exactly the same as the NB environment variable you give to Pegasus Mail).
Mail can be sent to any noticeboard using the address format <boardname>%nb@host.do-
main - so, for example, if you have a noticeboard called comp.sys.mail, you could mail it
using the address comp.sys.mail%nb@host.domain. Hint: we suggest you set up aliases
for noticeboards that you plan to mail regularly — this can simplify addressing the message,
since the % format is probably not immediately intuitive for most users.

Foldering subsystem settings
The foldering subsystem is the Mercury component that manages user mailboxes: when you
connect to Mercury using the IMAP protocol, your access to your mailbox all happens
through this subsystem.

Enable 'lingering mailboxes' The process of accessing a user's mailbox requires a lot of ini-
tialization, and if the mailbox contains many folders, it can be quite time consuming. When
users connect to your mail server using a conventional IMAP client such as Pegasus Mail or
Microsoft Outlook, this initialization typically doesn't have a large impact, because the IMAP
client keeps the connection open while it uses it. By contrast, other types of IMAP client, such
as webmail interfaces and cellphones, often do not hold the session open, but establish a new
session each time they need to download information: for this type of client, the repeated de-
lay caused by mailbox initialization can become quite a problem. To get around this, Mercury
supports the idea of 'lingering mailboxes': when this feature is enabled, Mercury does not
break down the mailbox image when the connection to it is closed - instead, it puts it into a
short-term cache: if a new connection comes in for the mailbox before it expires from the
cache, it can be reused immediately, without any initialization at all. For IMAP-intensive en-
vironments, this setting can significantly reduce connection delays, increase IMAP perform-
ance, and can result in marked reductions of I/O loading on your server.