Mercury/32 v4.91 (November 2022)

Version 4.91 corrects a problem with producing self-signed certificates and certificate signing requests; what's more, many more options are now available using the "Advanced" page in the certificate creator. As well as this, a rare problem that could cause crashes on mail receipt has been fixed, and problems displaying help on some systems have been corrected. We apologize for the delay in releasing v4.91 — this was caused by problems tracking down a rogue issue introduced by an external module, which has now been fixed as well. Along with these changes and corrections, v4.91 also contains the following additions and updates:

• Aliasing fixes  A rare problem that could result in aliases not being correctly saved on some systems has been fixed.


• Standalone certificate creator  V4.91 includes a standalone application, tcpcerts.exe that can be run outside Mercury to create SSL certificates and CSRs. The program will be installed in the same directory as MERCURY.EXE.


• Killfiles for autoforwarding  When you have automatic forwarding enabled for a user, you can now create a file called FORWARD.KFL in that user's mailbox directory containing sender addresses that should not result in messages being autoforwarded.
  


• Significant improvements to redistribution   'Redistribution' is the process of taking an incoming message and sending it to someone else — for instance, when forwarding, or sending mail to a mailing list. Mercury v4.91 contains significant improvements in the way redistribution is performed, especially with regards to autoforwarding. These changes should make it easier and more reliable to redistribute mail to sites that use anti-spam measures such as SPF or DMARC.

To download Mercury/32 v4.91, please visit our downloads page.

Mercury/32 v4.90, October 2021

Version 4.9 is an important major release containing numerous significant changes and fixes.

• OpenSSL v1.1.1  V4.9 has migrated to the modern OpenSSL 1.1.1 interface and incorporates an up-to-date build of OpenSSL. This is an important improvement that will allow Mercury to provide up-to-date security for quite some time.


• Improved alias support  V4.9 now supports improved aliasing with support for hundreds of thousands of aliases, dramatic performance improvements, and the ability to edit the alias source file directly while the program is running (no more compilation of alias files using malias.exe is required). The program's Alias editor has also been overhauled, with a new incremental search feature making it far easier to locate aliases.


• Forwarding fixes  Delivery errors during autoforwarding of mail are now handled much better than in previous versions, and there is no longer the possibility of mail loops resulting from the presence of undeliverable addresses in forward files.


• New defenses for password probe attacks  A new option in MercuryS ("Enable simplified phishing protection" on the "Compliance" configuration page) allows blacklisting any address that fails a login attempt. This significantly impacts attacks where repetitive attempts are made to guess passwords through consecutive connections.


• New ClamWall build  V4.90 includes a new build of Lukas Gebauer's ClamWall distributed anti-virus plugin for Mercury. The new build includes maintenance fixes and support for 64-bit versions of the ClamAV anti-virus engine.


• Security fix  A correction has been put in place for a theoretical exploit of the STARTTLS/STLS commands, CVE-2021-33487.


• IMAP reliability improved  The reliability of the MercuryI IMAP server has been significantly improved, particularly in regard to the use of iOS devices. A long-standing problem with UIDs "going bad" during a session has been resolved, and folder hierarchy files should experience fewer problems with apparent "corruption". Note that some Thunderbird users may find they need to disable "chunking" to work with this Mercury release - this is a side-effect of the other fixes we have put in place and will be addressed in a future release.


• Mailing Lists: improved incremental search  A new "inline" incremental search has been added in the "Membership" dialog of the mailing list editor, making it far easier to locate subscribers either by address or by name.


• Improved HS.EXE (header search utility)  The HS.EXE header search facility has been significantly updated with new options to print significant headers from matched messages, and the option to show only a total match count instead of showing each actual match. Haven't used HS? It's actually really useful - give it a try!


• Improved debugging  This one is a bit technical, but bear with me: the program is now entirely produced in a single compiler (Microsoft Visual C) where previous versions have been a hybrid of multiple build environments. What I've done is retrofit quite a lot of Mercury v5 internal coding into v4.9 allowing it to be entirely built using the one compiler. This mainly means that it becomes *much* easier to track down bugs in the program now, and it should be markedly more reliable as a result.


• User interface improvements  This one is purely cosmetic, but the hideously ugly column title bars used in lists in the Mercury UI have been toned down to something less visually stressful. Admittedly, this won't matter to most people, but it really bugged me.


• Extended regex syntax now works  The Mercury help describes a regular expression syntax including a number of advanced features, but it turns out that many of those advanced features had not been enabled because of an oversight. In v4.90, all the regular expression syntax elements shown in the Mercury help page will work correctly as described.


• Licensing commitment  Any license purchased for v4.9 will be automatically upgraded to v5 when it becomes available.

To download Mercury/32 v4.90, please visit our downloads page.

[ Page modified 5 November 2022 | Content © David Harris ]