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91 The MercuryI IMAP4rev1 server
Configuration
cury protocol modules to configure and maintain; in most cases, in fact, it can be used without
any configuration or ongoing maintenance at all.
TCP/IP Timeout (timeout) The length of time in seconds that MercuryI should wait for data
on a connection before assuming that the connection is no longer valid and aborting it. Note
that this timeout value is only applied while MercuryI is actually actively sending data or
waiting for a response from the client – it is different from the connection idle timeout, which
is discussed below.
IMAP Idle Timeout The length of time that a connection to MercuryI can remain in an idle
state before MercuryI should disconnect it. Idle state in this context means a period of time
during which the client issues no commands to the server: when the server and client are ac-
tually exchanging data, the TCP/IP timeout value is used instead (see above). The standard
governing IMAP, RFC3501, mandates that the idle timeout value on any connection may
never be set lower than 30 minutes, and MercuryI enforces this requirement.
Listen on TCP/IP port Enter here the TCP/IP port on which MercuryI should listen for in-
coming connections. The usual and default value for this field is 143, but you may want to
change this on certain occasions.
Default charset for folder names IMAP provides a mechanism for creating folders that con-
tain accented (international) characters. MercuryI supports this, but needs to know what char-
acter set it should assume when processing the IMAP names. The usual default on English
language and Western European copies of Windows is ISO-8859-15, but if you live in parts
of Eastern Europe, you may prefer to use ISO-8859-2 or CP1250. Note that the requirement
for a default character set is a short-term measure only - future versions of Mercury will be
able to handle a much wider range of character sets, and to do so automatically.
IP Interface to use If your computer supports multiple IP interfaces, you can use this field
to tell MercuryI which interface it should select when listening for connections: enter the in-
terface as a dotted IP address in the general form www.xxx.yyy.zzz. As an example, your
system may have one IP address assigned to a dialup PPP connection, and another, different
IP address assigned to a local Ethernet network - you would enter here the interface you need
MercuryI to use. If you leave this field blank, MercuryI will listen on all available interfaces.
Unless you are very sure of what you are doing, or have been instructed by an ISP or network
administrator, you should leave this field blank. If you change the IP interface in this field,
you must restart Mercury before the new interface number will be used.
Refuse access when no password is defined When this control is checked, MercuryI will
refuse all attempts to login to an account where no password is provided. This effectively dis-
ables access to accounts without a password: because this is almost always an important se-
curity issue, this control is enabled by default.
Logging The General logging field allows you to specify a file in which MercuryI should
write information about incoming IMAP connections. If you leave this field blank, no general
log will be kept. Session logging is a special mode in which a complete transcript of every
incoming session is stored in a file. You provide the name of a directory, and MercuryI will
create a file for each session, with the extension .MI. Session logs can provide invaluable de-
bugging information if you are having trouble receiving mail from certain sites, but they con-
sume disk space at a frightening rate. You will typically only use session logging to resolve
specific problems.