Installing E-MailRelay on Windows should be straightforward if you have the setup program emailrelay-setup.exe and its associated payload files.
Run emailrelay-setup.exe as an administrator if you are going to be installing into protected directories like Program Files.
The setup GUI will take you through the installation options and then install the run-time files into your chosen locations.
If anything goes wrong with the installation process then you can still just run the main E-MailRelay executable straight out of the distribution zip file. Follow the Manual installation section below for more help.
After a successful installation you should see E-MailRelay listed in the Windows Start Menu. This will run the emailrelay-start.bat batch file to start the E-MailRelay server, and you should then see an icon appear in the Windows system tray.
E-MailRelay is configured though command-line options like --verbose or --spool-dir=c:/temp in the emailrelay-startup.bat batch file.
These options are all documented in the reference document, although there are some Windows-specific variations:
Account information can be configured by editing the E-MailRelay secrets file. Look for the --client-auth or --server-auth options in the startup batch file to find out where this is.
The manual installation process for when you do not have the self-extracting setup program, goes something like this:
Copy the shortcuts to Start Menu and Startup folders as necessary.
E-MailRelay can be set up as a service so that it starts up automatically at boot-time. If you are setting this up manually you must first have a one-line batch file called emailrelay-start.bat that contains all the command-line options for running the E-MailRelay server, and you must have a simple configuration file called emailrelay-service.cfg that points to it. The configuration file must be in the same directory as the emailrelay-service.exe executable.
The batch file should contain a single line, something like this:
start "emailrelay" "C:\Program Files\E-MailRelay\emailrelay.exe" --forward-to smtp.example.com:25 ...
There is no need to use --no-daemon and --hidden; these are added automatically.
The contents of the configuration file can be a single line like this:
dir-config="C:\ProgramData\E-MailRelay"
Then just run emailrelay-service --install from an Administrator command prompt to install the service.
Every time the service starts it reads the configuration file and the startup batch file in order to run the E-MailRelelay program.
If you need to run multiple E-MailRelay services then put a unique service name and display name on the emailrelay-service --install <name> <display-name> command-line. The service name you give is used to derive the name of the <name>-start.bat batch file that contains the E-MailRelay server's command-line options, so you will need to create that first.
To uninstall:
E-MailRelay normally writes errors and warnings into the Windows Event Log, which you can view by running eventvwr.exe or going to ControlPanel->SystemAndSecurity->AdministrativeTools->EventViewer; from there look under Windows Logs and Application.
You can increase the verbosity of the logging by adding the --verbose option to the E-MailRelay command-line, typically by editing the emailrelay-start.bat batch script.
The Windows Event Log is a bit clunky, so consider using daily log files by using the E-MailRelay --log-file option with the special %d date placeholder. Then turn off the event-log logging with --no-syslog.
The telnet program can be used for testing an E-MailRelay server. You should start by enabling the Windows telnet client using ControlPanel->Programs->TurnWindowsFeaturesOnAndOff.
Then run telnet from a command prompt, using localhost and the E-MailRelay port number as command-line parameters:
telnet localhost 25
This should show a greeting from the E-MailRelay server and then you can start typing SMTP commands like EHLO, MAIL FROM:<..>, RCPT TO:<...> and DATA.
E-MailRelay can be compiled on Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio C++ (MSVC) or mingw-w64. For MSVC builds there is a perl script (winbuild) that creates cmake files from the autotools makefiles, runs cmake to create the MSVC project files and then runs msbuild to compile E-MailRelay. If perl, cmake, MSVC, Qt and mbedTLS source are installed in the right way then the winbuild.bat batch file should be able to do a complete MSVC release build in one go.