Page 24 - Mercury Manual.book

19 The Mercury Core Module
Aliases

system (that is, to whom it could actually deliver a message). If the control is unchecked, then
anyone, no matter where they are located, may queue “notify” requests for users on your serv-
er.

Editing the mail server template files
The options to edit the mail server help file and to edit the lookup results template let you
customise the responses generated by the mail server to certain commands. (See the previous
section for information on editing template files). The Mail Server help file is a plain text file
- template substitutions cannot be used in it.

Aliases

An alias is a specialised form of e-mail address that stands in for another e-mail address on
your system. Aliases are often used to create addresses that do not vary, even though the per-
son receiving the mail may change. For example, say you want to offer your users an e-mail
address they can use to obtain help; it is clearly much better to use an address like help@my-
domain.com than to give the address of a user on your system, since if that user leaves or
is transferred, you can simply point the alias for “help” at the person’s replacement and your
users are not forced to change their addressing habits.

Mercury has very powerful aliasing features: you can access them either from this dialog, or
by using the commandline import/export tool MALIAS.EXE supplied with Mercury. An alias
simply consists of two parts - the alias (or, the address people use to send mail) and the real
world address (the address to which Mercury should deliver any messages it receives ad-
dressed to the alias). The real world address does not have to be a local address - it is perfectly
valid to have an alias for an address on a remote system (this approach is often used to redirect
mail to someone while they are absent, or if they leave the organization). To create an alias, You can even have an
alias for another alias, if
fill in the alias and the real world address, then click the Add as new button. you wish, up to five levels
deep.
To change either the alias or the real world address of an existing alias, click on it in the list,
then make the changes and press the Change button.

To remove an alias, click on it in the list then press the Delete button.

Exporting aliases You can save your alias list to a simple text file in the format expected by
the MALIAS commandline utility by clicking the Export button.

Public folder aliases
Mercury's companion mail client, Pegasus Mail, supports the idea of Public Folders - folders
that can be accessed by more than one user at a time. Mercury can deliver mail directly into
Pegasus Mail's public folders in the proper format, ready to read. To allow Mercury to do this,
you need to create an alias for each public folder to which delivery is to be enabled. The alias
type for public folders is PUBLIC:, followed by the full path to the directory. So, if you have
a public folder in P:\PUBLIC\MAIL1, and want any message sent to public1@exam-
ple.com to be delivered automatically into that folder, you would create this alias:

public1@example.com = PUBLIC:p:\public\mail1
Special aliases for autoresponding and filtering
Mercury supports three specialised aliases that work differently from other aliases - FILE:
aliases, TFILE: aliases and FILTER: aliases. A FILE: alias is an address that will return the