Mercury SMTP Server

Mercury MTS is a nifty free mail server from the same company that offers the free mail client Pegasus. Both can be downloaded from http://www.pmail.com/ .

Depending on the modules that you choose during setup, Mercury can act as a stand-alone SMTP server and client (to send and receive emails directly), SMTP relaying client (to send emails to Internet recipients through a mail server at your ISP), POP server (to deliver mail to local users) and POP client (to retrieve e-mails through your ISP's mail server, and deliver them locally through the Mercury POP server), mailing lists, filtering rules, aliases, support for black-listing spammers (ORBS, RBL), server-based email directory through PH, etc. Quite amazing for a free mail server!

XAMPP package includes Mercury and during installation the user is provided with the option to whether install the Mercury or not. Installing Mercury with XAMPP is as smooth as just clicking next button until the installation is finished.

I tried installing XAMPP on my local server and immediately test the PHP mail() function to test the mail server. The first error I encountered is this one:

Warning: mail() [function.mail]: Failed to connect to mailserver at "localhost" port 25, verify your "SMTP" and "smtp_port" setting in php.ini or use ini_set() in C:\xampp\htdocs\ramises\sendEmail.php on line 72

which made me realize that there isn't any mail server running on my local server. I opened the XAMPP control panel and made sure that Mecury is running. The XAMPP control panel has a "start" option on each of the modules. If Mercury is not running on your server, simply click "start" to make use of its service.

This time I am confident that the dummy script I made will run perfectly, but I have this problem now: Warning: mail() [function.mail]: SMTP server response: 553 We do not relay non-local mail, sorry. in C:\xampp\htdocs\ramises\sendEmail.php on line 72 If ever one of you meet "Server Response: 553", open the XAMPP control panel, click the admin button on the Mercury row to open the Mercury window. Go to "Configuration->Mercury SMTP Server->Connection control" and uncheck the "Do not permit SMTP relaying of non-local mail". Running my script again . . . . and whoaaalaaaaa, script runs perfectly!

Kindly Bookmark and Share it: