Pegasus Mail & Mercury

Hi there

I'd like to see the following feature in Mercury: to have the ability to use an addresses file (one address per line) and in the alias dialog to create an alias linking this file to an address, sending a mail to the alias would have the result to send the mail to all the addresses of the file.

This seem to me more simple than the mailing lists (that have more feature which are not useful in that case).

Regards

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Philippe Chartier
French translation team leader

We do this a lot using a general filtering rule set with copy, forward and move lines, with an alias pointing to the rules files via a FILTER: instruction.

/Rolf 

Thanks Rolf

As I'm not very efficient with Mercury, could you give me some more details on the way you proceed?

Regards

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Philippe Chartier
French translation team leader

It's two steps, creating the rule set and creating the alias, both are quite simpel. From Mercury help:

General rule sets are sets of filtering rules that can be attached to any e-mail address in your system via an alias. Unlike global rules, which are applied to all mail messages passing through the system, general rules are only applied when mail is delivered to the address to which they are attached.

You can create or maintain a general rule set using the options on the Filtering rules submenu of the Configuration menu. We recommend you use the extension .RUL to identify your rule sets, but this is not a hard-and-fast requirement of the program.

To use a general rule set you have created, you need to create an alias that tells Mercury to invoke the set. To do this, choose Aliases from the Configuration menu and create a new alias. For the Alias, type in whatever address is to be associated with the set, then for the Real address, type in the special string FILTER: followed by the filename of the filtering rule set.

Example: if you wanted to invoke the alias set C:\MERCURY\ORDER.RUL any time a mail message was sent to orders@sales.com, then you would create the following alias:

Alias        orders@sales.com
    Real address:    filter:c:\mercury\order.rul

Go to Configuration / Filtering rules / New general rule set to create the rule. Click Always triggers. For a local user use the "Copy message to another user" action, for a non-local "Forward message". Repeat this for all recipients in the group. If you plan to create a lot of groups this way it can be a good idea to create a special sub-directory to save the .rul files in.

/Rolf

Thanks a lot Rolf but unfortunately it won't do the trick: I've more than 1200 users, each one belongs at least at 3 distribution lists (136 lists containing 5 to 1200 users). Too many rules to manage in that case.

This justifies my wish about Mercury...

Thanks again

Regards

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Philippe Chartier
French translation team leader

Nevertheless, I tried to make it work to see how are the sources to check if I could complete them via script, that should do the trick. But it did not work: I created a filtering rule:

Mercury Rule Set
Always Move "user1@mydomain.org"
Always Move "user2@mydomain.org"
Always Move "user3@mydomain.org"
Always Delete ""

Last line because the matching address (the one which has an alias with rule) does not exist. The rule is called group.rul and an alias between the address and the rule is created:

group@mydomain.org == C:\Mercury\Rules\Group.rul

Mercury answers that the address (group@mydomain.org) does not exist and a reply is sent to the sender, no mail is copied...

Regards

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Philippe Chartier
French translation team leader

As you already noted you can create the .rul files manually (or with some help program) as well as via the GUI.

Linking to an alias is simple, but you seem to have missed the magical word FILTER:, which is required for an alias that points to a rule set.

Please note that you should use the Copy action, otherwise only the first recipient will receive the message. The Delete action won't hurt but it's strictly speaking not needed. Mercury help says:

Filtering and real addresses  Filtering is done before user delivery occurs, so if you wish, you can create a filtering alias that is the same as a real e-mail address on your system, and the filtering will occur instead of delivery. If you do this and still want the message delivered, you must make sure you place a Copy to local user rule that always triggers in your rule set, because Mercury does not otherwise deliver a message once it has been processed by the filtering rule subsystem.

/Rolf 

 

Thanks for the hint about 'FILTER:', I didn't see it, now it works better but not fully.

Explanantions:

Let's say that the local domain is 'mydomain.org'

I created a filtering rule (group.rul) saying:

Mercury Rule Set

Always  copy "user1"

Always copy "user2@outsidedomain.org"

Always copy "user3@mydomain.com"

user1 and user3 are existing local users

Then I created an alias: group@mydomain.org == FILTER:C:\MERCURY\RULES\GROUP.RUL

And sent an email to group@mydomain.org, only the 1st one (user1) received the mail:

I could see the mail for group@mydomain.org arriving in the smtp server (MercuryP), passing to the core  process and that's all...

BTW: don't you think that we should move this thread to the Mercury Community Support forum?

Thanks a lot for your help

 

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Philippe Chartier
French translation team leader

Copy (or Move) will only work to a local username (i.e user1)

For external users or to use the full email address, use the 'Forward' action.

Thanks a lot dilberts_left_nut and Rolf, it works and it seems to be easily scriptable.

Next step is filtering on the From: field, I will open  a new thread on the support forum.

Thanks again guys

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Philippe Chartier
French translation team leader