Apache Friends Support Forum

Can someone please, please help me? I am mystified by this problem. I started Mercury from the Xampp control panel. Tried to send a message which failed. Now the XAMPP control panel says Mercury is running and when I click on START to switch it to STOP, nothing happens. I looked at the files and noticed there is a mercury_start.bat but no mercury_stop.bat file. Should there be a mercuy_stop.bat file, and would this missing file cause this problem?

Also, the mercury.ini file is empty.

This problem happened once before, but only after Mercury worked for a while. I deleted XAMPP and reinstalled it with all of the files. Now it has happened again, but this time, almost immediately. By the way, I am running XAMPP on XP Home Edition with Norton Internet Security with a router. I have to disable Norton in order to use PHPMySql, and I tried this with Mercury but to no avail.

I did not have a chance to back up any files, yet, so I'm not sure if files are actually missing or corrupted. Do I need to download XAMPP again, and is there something I can do to prevent this problem? I am using Apache as a local testing server, and need to test my email scripts that use the php mail() function, and I think I need Mercury for this. I'm a website designer, not IP person, so I don't understand too much of this.

it seems that you cannot stop Mercury, but can only put it "offline"

And my mercury.ini is not empty.

You can start your mercury first, without looking at mercury.ini. Once your mercury is running, you can go back and see your mercury.ini if it is empty now.

I am not a mercury expert, and I still cannot use mercury to send an email successfully, even after reading the help file.

Hope it helps.

Erasing the mercury.ini file is a known issue with Mercury. Depending on which version it is, there should be a file in the same directory called "mercury.bak" which is a backup copy of the .ini file. Copy it - do not just rename it - and rename the copy.

As to sending email through it, it's mainly an issue with the Windows version of PHP not really supporting the SMTP functions properly. Mercury can be a little tricky, though. You can try downloading hmail from http://www.hmailserver.com/ instead. It seems to be a little more stable. But check your php.ini file (and use the PHPInfo function to make certain you're in the correct one - there are several) to make sure it looks like this

[mail function] section is set to
; For Win32 only.
SMTP = localhost

; For Win32 only.
sendmail_from = (some valid email address on the local system)

and that the Sendmail path is remarked out:

;sendmail_path =

(The semi-colon at the front has to be there)

A lot of scripts, like PHPBB and some webmail scripts, have their own SMTP functions built from scratch. Make sure they're set to use SMTP, not Sendmail.

If you're writing your own email script, the easiest way to send through Mercury (unless you're adding attachments) is to just write the outgoing message as a .101 file in the Queue directory.

Thanks, Taustin. I copied contents of the mercury.bak into mercury.ini and I can now start and stop the Mercury server. Easy fix.

If you don't plan to make changes to Mercury very often, you can right-click on the mercury.ini file, bring up properties, and set it to read-only.

BUT, you MUST remember to reset it before you can make changes in the future.