Category: Geeks r Us
Just wondering who else is running their own mail servers. I finally, after 2 days of work, got Mercury v4.62 (http://www.pmail.com) to work correctly, but it required me to forward some odd ports because my router wouldn't let me forward 110 and 25--said it conflicted with another service. For those who are unfamiliar with Mercury, it's a free POP3/SMTP/IMAP/HTTP mail server that uses a GUI for configuration. It works for both Windows and Novell NetWare systems. It's working well for me despite the fact that it doesn't support running as a service--I just copied a shortcut to it into my Startup folder. This program also supports creating your own mailing lists, which I find interesting. With this feature, if ever I want to make up my own mailing list and not be limited by the configuration options of one of the Web-based services, I don't need to have a Unix box to build and run Ecartis, which is one of the mailing-list management programs out there.
I used that server once upon a time. AS for your router, most routers come with a preconfigured choice for forwarding 25 and 110, so that's what it may be conflicting with.
Murcury is a pretty decent server as I recall, but it's been a few years since I used it.
The thing is that my router did not seem to have a choice for forwarding 25 and 110, so I chose some different ports (which is also a bit more secure). I'm using MercuryC for relaying SMTP through my ISP's SMTP server, and that works pretty well. A bit of lag time, but hey, that's to be expected when you're relaying your message through another server.