Hi, I couldn’t find the answer for this problem on any blogs, thus I figured it out myself.
I have minimum experience with protocols, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
Here goes: What happens is, when you start Mercury, it loads certain services into ports.
You can check this with Xampp-portchecker this is the default setup for Mercury.
[HTTP] = port 80, [SMTP] = port 25, [pop3] = port 110, [IMAP] = port 143.
The problem is that Appache also uses port 80 to run you localhost environment.
When you start Mercury, it overrides the Appache service, thus directing you to mercury as localhost
instead of the environment that you have set up in Appache.
Step(1) Open the Xampp ControlPanel Start Mercury and click on Admin.
Step(2) Mercury should now open. Click on Configuration->ProtocolModules.
Step(3) Uncheck MercuryB HTTP web server. Restart Mercury.
Easy as that. Mercury and Appache sould now play nice.
Joomla! and Mercury.
This is a setup tutorial for mercury to work with Joomla! for whoever may need it.
This is how I set up the mail test environment on my pc.
In Mercurys' configuration, Click Manage local Users.
You can create test mail accounts here.
It is Important to add passwords to users for them to function.
Thus.. If you click change on postmaster, you can add a password.
Go to the backend of Joomla! and set it up as follows.
Click on Site->Global configuration. click on server tab.
Mailer = SMTP Server
Mail from =
postmaster@localhost.com
SMTP Username = postmaster
SMTP Password = [your password]
SMTP Host = localhost
It should now send files from localhost.
Create a new User in Mercury. lets call the user testserver.
You can now set up your user account in your mail client.
I use thunderbird. This is what your account setup should look like:
Your Name: Jhon Doe
Email Address:
testserver@localhost.com
You can Use pop3 but I prefer Imap since it keeps your files separate.
Incoming server: localhost
Incoming username: testserver
Account Name: Test Server
You can now Use your fake mail account on your local testing environment as if your site is online.
This is very useful for offline testing.
I hope this helps someone, since I could find no documentation on it myself.