Page 23 - Mercury Manual.book

The Mercury Core Module 18
Configuring the Autonomous Mail Server

Content-type: Multipart/Mixed; boundary=~Y
Now, at the start of each part of your message, add the following lines

—~Y
Content-type: Text/Plain

Making sure that there is a single blank line between these lines and the start of the text of the
message part (note that there are two dash characters before the ~Y on the first line).

For an example of how to generate Multipart MIME messages in Mercury, please see the
sample delivery failure template file, FAILURE.MER, supplied with Mercury.

Configuring the Autonomous Mail Server

Mercury’s Autonomous Mail Server provides a number of automated services, including au-
tomatic mailing list subscription and unsubscription, file transmission, user lookup and
search facilities, and remailing messages at specific times. In the description of each option
below, the word in brackets after the name of the configuration option is the keyword in MER-
CURY.INI that is equivalent to that option.

General mail server configuration
Help file (helpfile) The file Mercury should send when it receives a help command, or when
it receives any command it does not recognize.

Lookup results file (lookupfile) The name of a template file that the mail server should use
to return the results of user searches using the Lookup command. If this field is left blank,
then the lookup command will be disabled.

Log file (logfile) The name of a file in which the mail server should record all the commands
it processes. If this field is left blank, the mail server will not perform any logging.

“Send” directory (send_dir) The directory in which the mail server should search for files
requested using the Send command. Files in this directory must be text files, so if you want
to make binary files available via the Send command, you will have to uuencode them your-
self first. The mail server will only look in the directory you specify here and will not accept
filenames containing paths; because of this, the option is an extremely safe way of distribut-
ing data to the public via e-mail. If this entry is blank, then the mail server’s Send command
will be disabled.

“Notify” queue directory (notify) Mercury’s mail server supports two deferred mail com-
mands - Notify, which sends a broadcast message to the sender at a given time (if broadcasts
are supported on your network), and Remail, which sends a mail message at a particular
time. For these commands to be available, Mercury requires a directory where it can create
status files for each request: enter the path to that directory in this field (the directory must
exist already - Mercury will not create it). If this field is blank, the notify and remail com-
mands will be unavailable.

Disable the mail server “Lookup” command Check this control if you do not want the
Lookup command to be available on your system.

Only accept “notify” commands from local users (local_only) If this command is checked,
then the mail server will only accept Notify commands from users who are local to your