Please Please I need help with a network issue Setting up Mercury Mail Server Basic ?

[Capt Fiero]

Quick note at the top so you know what is going on, I am trying to set up an email list for local computer and car guys.

Please Please I need help with a network issue. This is pretty important to my fellow computer and car guys.


This is very important to me and to the the general Community in general as depending on how this goes I am planning to offer free (no ads or other junk) email list hosting to other fiero clubs that need it. Yahoo is good but way too many hoops to jump through as well as a much cleaner list would be a good thing. I just need some help from some tech heads in getting it set up. This way peoples email will be privately held and not in the hands of some corporation. Forums are Awesome. But not everyone can check a forum every day. This way you simply get an email in your inbox when something important is coming up. I also want to have a list for OT Fiero Chat and a 3rd list for Fiero+Others Some of us have friends that drive other cars than fiero’s that would love to be able to chat with us. So having a 3rd list option would be cool.. This is not limited to just one area. If it all works out, I would not mind setting up a Lists for various areas of the country.

I know some of you tech heads could set this up in an hour. I have spent all night working on it and have not really made much headway. I would love it if someone could show me the ropes, just get me started with it, so I can set up the last bits and start really get it running. BCFIERO’s (my local car club) lost over 50% of its active subscribers during the crash/switch to Yahoo. Many who emailed me and said they just gave up trying to jump through the yahoo hoops being new. They could not get it to work and said when I get a new server they will gladly get back on the new list.


First question what is an MX record and do I need to do anything with it.
2nd I have mail.captfiero.com handled on domain direct as a pop account, should I, can I, do I need to port it over to the new machine.
What ports should I open up on the server. UDP/TCP or Both (110 TCP)??
What should my domain URL be.
Do I need to worry about IMAP4 Sever Settings
What is a PH Server Do I need to even look at it



I am using Mercury Mail in conjunction with Pegasus Mail.

http://www.pmail.com/overviews/ovw_mercury.htm


Please take a look at the above link.

My big stumbling block is getting it fired up, how do I get mail to get to my server and in turn have my server understand what it is. There are a lot of settings I simply don’t understand the help section is written over my head for my knowledge.

My server is http://www.captfiero.com or 24.86.139.106:8080
(the 8080 port will be changed to 80, when I get a new router)
I can configure a Remote Desktop Account if someone that really has an understanding of it would like to browse around. This would be on a person by person agreement.
Server http://24.86.139.106:8080/server/bigimages/Fiero2.JPG That’s my Big Box. Yaa.



I use domain direct for direction services. http://www.domaindirect.com
If you PM I can arrange access for you to look at my account to see what domain direct offers. I am sure there is a way to do this. I admit I just don’t know enough yet.
I am on an always on Cable 7mb Net Connection, I have nearly unlimited bandwidth and a static ip. (I even host a great deal of pics here for people)

I understand Apache HTTP and Serv-U FTP so I do have some background.

Guys Please I really want to get this running. I have been reading till my head is going to explode on this matter.


Please and Thanks Huge in advance.


David aka Capt Fiero
Founder West Coast Fiero’s of B.C

[CGR]

An MX record is a mail exchange record. It tells email where to go and how to get there. It will be a record held on the DNS server that hosts your domain name in most cases.

If you want to receive email you need to have the MX record pointing to the FQDN of your server along with your domain name. In order to send email from the server you need to have an SMTP server, which will take your email and send it out to other SMTP servers to get to its destination.

You will need port 110 open for people to pop3 to your server. Must be opened in and out. Also you need port 25 open both ways to allow SMTP servers on the internet to reach your server and to allow your sever to send email to the internet.

[Capt Fiero]

An MX record is a mail exchange record. It tells email where to go and how to get there. It will be a record held on the DNS server that hosts your domain name in most cases.

If you want to receive email you need to have the MX record pointing to the FQDN of your server along with your domain name. In order to send email from the server you need to have an SMTP server, which will take your email and send it out to other SMTP servers to get to its destination.

You will need port 110 open for people to pop3 to your server. Must be opened in and out. Also you need port 25 open both ways to allow SMTP servers on the INTERNET to reach your server and to allow your sever to send email to the INTERNET.


Awesome Info so far. Thanks a ton. There is nothing worse than fighting with something and realizing that you forgot a port or something else simple.

[Capt Fiero]

An MX record is a mail exchange record. It tells email where to go and how to get there. It will be a record held on the DNS server that hosts your domain name in most cases.

If you want to receive email you need to have the MX record pointing to the FQDN of your server along with your domain name. In order to send email from the server you need to have an SMTP server, which will take your email and send it out to other SMTP servers to get to its destination.

You will need port 110 open for people to pop3 to your server. Must be opened in and out. Also you need port 25 open both ways to allow SMTP servers on the internet to reach your server and to allow your sever to send email to the internet.


Ok I found the MX settings on my domain host. Tons of warnings around it about changing it. Kinda has be worried.

I have an SMTP Client running on my personal server

What is the FQDN?

I opened up port 25 and 110 on the router, and just for test, I sent an email to postmaster@24.86.139.106 and Mercury Mail saw it come in, but then deferred it saying it was not local. But at least now I know I can sorta talk to it.

[klingens]

FQDN = fully qualified domain name. In your case mail.captfiero.com

Port 25 is for SMTP, port 110 for POP3. Both TCP only.

[Capt Fiero]

Maybe I should be taking bloody screen shots. LOL. :beer:

Ok so I got that, Fully Qualifed DOmain Name.


I have attached a screen shot of the mx record part that I can change.

I have to run out for a bit, dang I wish I didn't as I think I am just about to get this working, but I will be back as soon as I can.

What I need to know is what part of that I need to change and what I should change it to?

[pik4chu]

in the second screenshot, the hostname should say mail.captfiero.com I think, Did you setup the DNS entries for all these addresses? because mail.captfiero.com, smtp.captfiero.com, and www.captfiero.com all resolve to a different IP address (inbound.captfieor.com resolves to the same as the www one) And none of those addresses resolve to the one you have listed. Or is your ISP just playing hell with things?

The first entry (mail exchange) is the domain that people would send mail to, the second is what server to forward the mail to that is directed at the mail exchange (first entry)

So, if I send a message to you@captfiero.com the record will tell the message to forward it to mail.captfiero.com. This will resolve to the address of 216.40.35.34 which I assume is your router. Your router which should be configured to forward ports 110 and 25 to your server running Mercury you will then receive the mail. Btw, if the IP I listed is NOT correct then you may have a DNS issue (as in regular (A) records, not MX). if you ping mail.captfiero.com you should be pinging the public IP address where your server is located. Are you sure you have a static IP?

If you recently made changes to your DNS settings the changes take a while to fully propogate and perhaps I simply am getting a bad resolve.

[Capt Fiero]

The screen shots are of the default settings from domain direct. I have not touched a thing yet.

Right now I am using the pop/web mail from domain direct I only posted up those shots to give people an idea of what domain direct is letting me change.

At the end of the mail.captfiero.com which is off the screen it actually reads, mail.captfiero.com.emailmx.com. and for the smtp.captfiero.com.emailmx.com

Further down it goes inbound.captfiero.com.emailmx.com

There is also an option to add new mail exchange. So far I have not changed a thing.

My IP is partially static. If I don't change the router/nic connected to the modem it will remain on a single IP for as long as a year in the past. Even during extended power outages it always comes back to the correct IP. On the rare time it doesn't I quickly load up domain direct and update the addresses. To confirm my IP just go to www.captfiero.com and wave over a few links the ones with a numeric link are my true IP. The ones with text links are usually to other sites within either my personal domain or the www.westcoastfieros.com domain which is also on my server. The captfiero mail server is just to get things working then I am going to make a perfect one for my car club and some street racing buddies.

Would it help if I posted some of the config options from Mercury.

[klingens]

remove all your subdomains. all of them. THen mail to captfiero@captfiero.com gets to your main server where mercury runs. Problem solved

MX records are normally only used when the IP of the mailserver and the IP of the domain )domain.com) are different. Which is not the case with you.

[Capt Fiero]

Uhm, but my email is capt@captfiero.com

how would I get it to do that.

Everyone has just called me capt for the longest time so it stuck.

I like the idea of simply removing everything, just not sure if it is going to do what I need.

[klingens]

Either you believe what we say or you don't. If you don't: why did you ask?

No CNAME, no MX records.

[Capt Fiero]

Either you believe what we say or you don't. If you don't: why did you ask?

No CNAME, no MX records.

Excuse me, believing you is not in question. My question is,

is it going to then try to send all mail to captfiero@captfiero.com or capt@captfiero.com

maybe I am misunderstanding what you are saying. If you are saying that all mail sent to capt@captfiero.com will go to my server with everything deleted I will go ahead and do it. I just can't figure where you got captfiero@captfiero.com from. As if anything looks for that, it is going to go no place.

[su root]

Does domaindirect offer mailing lists? If so, why not use those instead?

At the beginning of this thread, this is how your mail flowed:
MX = inbound.captfiero.emailmx.com
That is MX Logic's EDS (a paid spam protection product of Tucows/OpenSRS). From there, I imagine the mail flowed to domaindirect's servers, which processed your mail, and you connect to it via POP3 or IMAP to read it.

From my understanding, you want to leave your mail alone, but want to run a mailing list off of your server, correct? What klingens is directing you to do is change your MX record to point at your server, which will change the flow of all of your domain's mail. You will need to configure any email accounts you had on domaindirect on your mail server. If you have access to the MX Logics Configuration for your domain (which you probably don't), it is possible to configure it to loop through MX Logics, so that you still get spam protection.

If you want to redirect all of the mail bound for your domain, first make sure that you can send an email... assuming pegasus is configured properly, connect to it and send an email to someone... check the logs and see if it fails or stays in the queue. A lot of ISPs do not allow outgoing mail on port 25, in which case, this gets a whole lot more complicated. If that works, changing your MX record to point at an A record that resolves to your IP is enough to flow the mail to your server (assuming your server is correctly configured to accept it).

[pik4chu]

Either you believe what we say or you don't. If you don't: why did you ask?

No CNAME, no MX records.
you need to relax a bit, he just didnt know what you meant.

@capt fiero, he simply assumed your email was captfiero@captfiero.com it was his suggestion for testing purposes, so whatever your email is that is what you use.