Xampp's Mercury Mail doesn't save settings

htuckjr wrote on Wednesday, May 14, 2014:

Hi Folks-

I’m trying to set up Mercury Mail/32 in OpenEMR-xampp 4.12 patch 5 on a Win 7 Home Premium desktop box operating on a home LAN behind a household- grade D-Link router.

I’m pretty sure that I scrupulously follow the Mercury Mail setup/ config instructions from the OpenEMR wiki but several settings do not reappear after shutting MercMail down and restarting it. Specifically I’m looking at MercuryS SMTP’s “Announce myself as”, MercuryC SMTP’s connection type, port settings and smtp server login/ passwd, but others don’t save either. And not only do the settings not reappear when I restart the admin panel, but when I try to send a test email absolutely nothing happens.

The settings that do stick are the ones I can get into MERCURY.INI and edit directly; those MercS and -C items are among several that don’t seem to be in the .INI file.

I’m accustomed to Linux; maybe there are some Windows gotchas I’m unaware of? I’ve ‘right-click - run as Administrator’ for everything; changed the MercuryMail folder (and its files) from Read Only to full acccess; used the XAMPP control panel’s MercMail admin button to access the MercMail panel; turned off the XAMPP ctrl panel and used both mercury.exe and loader.exe (as admin); exited the MercMail panel with File/ Exit; shut everything off and rebooted after every attempt. No joy.

My instinct tells me I’m just missing one or two simple little things. Anybody got some clue for me?

Thanks- Harley

fsgl wrote on Thursday, May 15, 2014:

Perhaps this will help:
[[embed url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO2p3uX9poY]]

htuckjr wrote on Friday, May 16, 2014:

Hi fsgl-

Thanks again for the rapid remedy! Haven’t had a chance to try it out yet but I’ve watched it and there’s a fair number of differences from the wiki article. I wonder if there’s something wrong with my homebrew Win 7 setup, like file/ folder permissions or something? But I’d have thought Xampp’s install would have set all those. Also curious that I didn’t find many mentions of Merc Mail on the OpenEMR fora and none about config file write problems.

Anyway, will report back with whatever results I get.

  • HT

fsgl wrote on Friday, May 16, 2014:

Hi Harley,

Glad to help. Comments below the video were very positive. The young person seemed to have done a good job explaining. Images are also excellent educational tools.

Here is the search page for a few threads on the topic. Didn’t read the threads.

If you find the video to be useful, let us know of any modifications. I’ll add both to the Wiki after your feedback.

htuckjr wrote on Saturday, May 17, 2014:

Hi fsgl-

The video was interesting and well done, but if I understand what OpenEMR uses a mail server for, he was setting up a whole different bunch of functions; he didn’t even use the MercuryC SMTP module which I gather is the essential module for what we’re doing. Thanks for your search page but I’ve tried that material with no good results. I’ve also discovered 2 - 3 people posting to Mercury Mail/ Pegasus fora who had exactly the same problem as me, but they never got any replies to their posts!

In any case, my problem remains that when I enter a setting or parameter in the mercury mail admin panel, it doesn’t stick. Even if I shut down the admin gui nicely and come back to it, the setting is gone. If I directly type the setting in the MERCURY.INI file it shows up in the admin gui, but unfortunately not all of the settings entered into the MercuryC SMTP gui are represented in the the .INI file- or at least not by terms I recognize.

As I mentioned before, this problem has the odour of something I’ve brought on myself with what I’m calling my ‘homebrew’ Windows 7 installation. I’ll address that next.

Thanks again for your help! Hasta then-- HT

fsgl wrote on Sunday, May 18, 2014:

There is the option of emailing the author of the Wiki article so that you can ask your questions directly. Here is the link to his profile page. He is accepting emails.

htuckjr wrote on Thursday, May 22, 2014:

Hi fsgl-

Thanks for that link, I have sent him a message. I wish I had checked in here sooner, I would have seen your suggestion. I really appreciate your help.

Gotta run-- more news as it happens! - HT

htuckjr wrote on Friday, May 23, 2014:

Found a mention in the pegasus mail forum

http://community.pmail.com/forums/thread/7420.aspx

that not saving configs is a known bug with xampp 1.8.2 but 1.8.3 is good.

I’m curious that nobody else has reported this with the XAMPP/OpenEMR package.

Is there any reason I can’t just install the new XAMPP, or are there other configs that need to be made?

arnabnaha wrote on Friday, May 23, 2014:

What is the version of mercury mail u r using? I recommend using 4.74 …I personally use that and works best

htuckjr wrote on Friday, May 23, 2014:

Hi Arnab Naha-

I just used what was in the xampp/openemr 4.1.2 package, which is xampp 1.8.2, MercMail 4.6. It’s looking like I need to upgrade all the package components. Can you advise if I can simply install each one over their older versions?

arnabnaha wrote on Friday, May 23, 2014:

hi…harley…
U can only change the mercury mail package selectively…no need to change other xampp package…download the mercury mail ver 4.74

download link: http://www.pmail.com/downloads_s3_t.htm

and click on “Mercury/32 Mail Transport System for Win32 and NetWare Systems v4.74”

arnabnaha wrote on Friday, May 23, 2014:

If u have a teamviewer installed in your system…then i can have a session with u and do it for u on your system securely…if u wish

arnabnaha wrote on Friday, May 23, 2014:

i am no developer neither a mercury mail expert…i did it for my installation so will be helping u so that u can use it too…

htuckjr wrote on Friday, May 23, 2014:

Thank you for the download link and your offer of help. In my part of the world (Oregon, USA) it’s bedtime right now and I’m heading that way. I will download Mercury 4.74 first thing in the morning and if it doesn’t work right off, you’ll be hearing from me, I promise!

I just now glanced at the Teamviewer site and it looks interesting. I’ll look into it more tomorrow- specifically to see if they have a free version.

Regards- Harley

arnabnaha wrote on Friday, May 23, 2014:

Surely…they have a free version there…check it out and see if things work for u…Good Night:-)

arnabnaha wrote on Friday, May 23, 2014:

just on the homepage…it says…free for private use…

htuckjr wrote on Friday, May 23, 2014:

Had good results with a new install of MercuryMail 4.74 into c:\xampp\MercuryMail\ overwriting the existing 4.6 version. Had tried the upgrade option first but that didn’t fix the problem of not saving settings.

I went through the setup wizard, then checked all the settings manually by running loader.exe, looking in each module and filling in per your tutorial the few settings that weren’t already there.

Now it saves settings and sends mail-- except that it has trouble connecting to the smtp server I gave it. I suspect that has something to do with being on some blocked list somewhere… will check that out pretty soon.

But getting the configs to save was the major milestone I wanted to accomplish today. Thanks again, your suggestions were very helpful.

  • HT

fsgl wrote on Friday, May 23, 2014:

There is a section of the above video, starting at 9:30 about the Spamhaus block lists and how to get around it.