James stands for Java Apache Mail Enterprise Server!
It has a modular architecture based on a rich set of modern and efficient components which provides at the end complete, stable, secure and extendable Mail Servers running on the JVM.
Create your own personal solution for emails treatment by assembling the components you need thanks to the Inversion of Control mail platform offered and go further customizing filtering and routing rules using James Mailet Container.
Supported protocols are: IMAP, SMTP, JMAP, POP3 and more…
Read more on our website.
James is a project that lives from the contributions of its community! Anyone can contribute!
Read the contributing guidelines.
We more than welcome articles and blog posts about James. Contact us by email or on Gitter to share your experiences.
Documentation is an easy way to get started, and more than wanted! Check out the ~documentation label on JIRA.
And to get started with code contributions, search out the ~newbie, ~easyfix, ~feature labels on JIRA.
There is many other ways one can help us: packaging, communication, etc …
Requirements: docker & docker-compose installed.
When you try James this way, you will use the most current state of James. It will be configured to run with Cassandra & ElasticSearch. All those three components will be started with a single command.
You can retrieve the docker-compose file :
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/james-project/master/server/apps/distributed-app/docker-compose.yml
Then, you just have to start the services:
$ docker-compose up
Wait a few seconds in order to have all those services start up. You will see the following log when James is available: james | Started : true
A default domain, james.local, has been created. You can see this by running:
$ docker exec james java -jar /root/james-cli.jar -h 127.0.0.1 -p 9999 listdomains
James will respond to IMAP port 143 and SMTP port 25. You have to create users before playing with james. You may also want to create other domains. Follow the Useful commands section for more information about James CLI.
In order to have a standard compilation environment, we introduce Dockerfiles, using java-11.
We require maven version 3.6.0 minimum to build the project.
Simply run mvn clean install within this directory to compile the project.
Useful options includes:
-
-DskipTeststo skip the long to execute resource consuming test suite that requires a docker daemon. -
-T 4to parallelize the build on several CPUs.
This feature is available for three configurations :
See Manage James via the Command Line for more info.
# Add DOMAIN to 127.0.0.1 in your host /etc/hosts $ docker exec james_run java james-cli -h 127.0.0.1 -p 9999 adddomain DOMAIN
DOMAIN: is the domain you want to add.
Note: Using docker, one can add an environment variable holding the domain to be created. This domain will be created upon James start:
$ --environment DOMAIN=domain.tld
$ docker exec james_run java james-cli -h 127.0.0.1 -p 9999 adduser USER_MAIL_ADDRESS PASSWORD
Where :
-
USER_MAIL_ADDRESS: is the mail address that will be used by this user.
-
PASSWORD: is the password that will be used by this user.
You can then just add DOMAIN to your /etc/hosts and you can connect to your james account with for instance Thunderbird.
Each user can manage his SIEVE scripts through the manage SIEVE mailet.
To use the manage SIEVE mailet :
-
You need to create the user sievemanager@DOMAIN ( if you don’t, the SMTP server will check the domain, recognize it, and look for an absent local user, and will generate an error ).
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You can send Manage Sieve commands by mail to sievemanager@DOMAIN. Your subject must contain the command. Scripts needs to be added as attachments and need the ".sieve" extension.
To activate a script for a user, you need the following combination :
-
PUTSCRIPT scriptname
-
SETACTIVE scriptname
Some james data (those non related to mailbox, eg : mail queue, domains, users, rrt, SIEVE scripts, mail repositories ) are not yet supported by our Cassandra implementation.
To keep these data when you run a new container, you can mount the following volume :
-v /root/james-server-app-3.0.0-beta6-SNAPSHOT/var:WORKDIR/destination/var
Where :
-
WORKDIR: is the absolute path to your james-parent workdir.
Beware : you will have concurrency issues if multiple containers are running on this single volume.
James requires at least JDK 11 and Maven 3.6.0 to build. Some parts of James are written in Scala so one might need to enable Scala plugin in IDE.
We wrote some MPT (James' Mail Protocols Tests subproject) deployment tests to validate a James deployment.
It uses the External-James module, that uses environment variables to locate a remote IMAP server and run integration tests against it.
For that, the target James Server needs to be configured with a domain domain and a user imapuser with password password. Read above documentation to see how you can do this.
You have to run MPT tests inside docker. As you need to use maven, the simplest option is to use james/parent image, and override the entry point ( as git and maven are already configured there ) :
$ export JAMES_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1 $ export JAMES_IMAP_PORT=143 $ export JAMES_SMTP_PORT=25
$ mvn -T 1C -DskipTests -pl org.apache.james:apache-james-mpt-external-james -am install $ mvn -T 1C -pl org.apache.james:apache-james-mpt-external-james test -Pintegration-tests\
Where :
-
JAMES_IP: IP address or DNS entry for your James server
-
JAMES_IMAP_PORT: Port allocated to James' IMAP port (should be 143).
-
JAMES_SMTP_PORT: Port allocated to James' SMTP port (should be 25).
James comes with a Documentation and Architectural Decision Records.