Mercury mail simply isn't working for outside domains.

[nickolasnikolic]

I am editing this with the note that this is an XAMPP 1.7.2installation on Windows Vista with the firewall off and on (same results). There may be problems common to this arrangement.

Mercury mail simply isn't working for outside domains. It looks like it is, but mail doesn't arrive at the target email. It's strange. The email seem to be disappearing...

This is after a few support quirks. First, I received the error "Temporary error 249 (temporary MX resolution error) resolving gmail.com" I found out this was due to missing DNS settings, so I changed the Mercury's ini to include my isps name server with the following change to the Mercury.ini file under [MercuryE]

Nameserver : 207.69.188.186,207.69.188.187 (These are my isp's nameservers)

Now, the error 249 is gone and I get an ok message as follows:

Connection from localhost, the date
Helo my computer name
mail from postmaster@localhost
recipient my email at gmail
data - 6 lines, 131 bytes
quit

Here are the logs from MercuryE:

T 20100106 183318 4b452aee Begin processing job MO0030CC from postmaster@localhost
T 20100106 183319 4b452aee Established ESMTP connection to 74.125.113.27
W 20100106 183350 4b452aee DATA state transient error - 421-4.7.0 [24.223.205.228] Our system has detected an unusual amount of
E 20100106 183350 4b452aee TCP/IP error.
T 20100106 183350 4b452aee Job MO0030CC processing complete.
T 20100106 223134 4b4563a4 Begin processing job MO000002 from postmaster@localhost
T 20100106 223134 4b4563a5 Begin processing job MO000004 from postmaster@localhost
T 20100106 223134 4b4563a6 Begin processing job MO000006 from postmaster@localhost
T 20100106 223134 4b4563a7 Begin processing job MO000008 from postmaster@localhost
T 20100106 223134 4b4563a8 Begin processing job MO00000A from postmaster@localhost
T 20100106 223134 4b4563a9 Begin processing job MO00000C from postmaster@localhost
T 20100106 223134 4b4563aa Begin processing job MO000891 from postmaster@localhost
T 20100106 223134 4b4563ab Begin processing job MO001310 from postmaster@localhost
T 20100106 223134 4b4563ac Begin processing job MO0014C8 from postmaster@localhost
T 20100106 223134 4b4563ad Begin processing job MO0014CA from postmaster@localhost

What are the possible causes of a TCP/IP error and what is a DATA state transient error?
Basically, it says everything is fine, only no email ever arrives. Not in spam folder. No where. What am I doing wrong?

These are the notes for using Mercury with XAMPP:

Notes for using Mercury:

* Mercury needs an external connection on startup;
* on startup, Mercury defines the Domain Name Service (DNS) automatically as the name server of your provider;
* For all user of gateway servers: Please set your DNS via TCP/IP (f.e. via InterNic with the IP number 198.41.0.4);
* the config file of Mercury is called MERCURY.INI;
* to test, please send a message to postmaster@localhost or admin@localhost and check for these messages in the following folders: \xampp\MercuryMail\MAIL\Admin;
* one test user called "newuser" (newuser@localhost) with the Password = wampp;
* spam and other obscenities are totally forbidden with Mercury!;

The only thing is, Mercury clearly doesn't get the nameserver from Windows Vista. So this is set explicitly in the Mercury.ini by me - possibly to my chagrin. I'm not sure what a gateway server is, but I don't think I am operating through one. I can test the mail and have received a message directly through php's mail command:

Received: from spooler by localhost (Mercury/32 v4.62); 6 Jan 2010 15:40:20 -0600
X-Envelope-To: <nickolasnikolic@localhost>
Return-path: <postmaster@localhost>
Received: from acer (127.0.0.1) by localhost (Mercury/32 v4.62) ID MG00000D;
6 Jan 2010 15:40:13 -0600
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:40:13 -0600
Subject: this is another test
To: nickolasnikolic@localhost
From: (This was sent through the php's mail command with no errors to a local address)

[nickolasnikolic]

I've got it working. I needed to explicitly set the port 25 on the windows firewall exceptions rather than just the executable Mercury.exe. This is still odd because it doesn't explain what wasn't working when the firewall was off, but it works for now, if there are any updates or new identical problems, I will post them.

It is still worth noting that Mercury in XAMPP doesn't work out of the box (at least on Vista) because the DNS nameservers aren't automatically picked up and deen to be explicitly added to Mercury.ini under [MercuryE]. But maybe this is for a later version of XAMPP.