Apache James Project

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…​

The Distributed server focuses on delivering an easy-to-operate scalable mail server based on modern technologies (Cassandra, S3, OpenSearch and RabbitMQ).

Read more on our website.

How to contribute?

Read more…​

James is a project that lives from the contributions of its community! Anyone can contribute!

Read how to contribute.

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 …​

How to try James

Read more…​

Requirements: docker installed.

Here you will try James server version 3.8.0 thanks to a docker image. This James image has a default configuration using JPA (hsqldb) and Lucene. It also includes a default domain named james.local and three default users: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], with their default password being 1234.

Note: this James server will respond to IMAPS port 993 and SMTPS port 465.

Pull and run the James image with the following single command:

    $ docker run -p "465:465" -p "993:993" apache/james:demo-3.8.0

Then, connect this image with for instance, Thunderbird. This tutorial covers more in depth user and domain creation, as well as Thunderbird setup.

Instructions that do not imply docker are also available here.

Instructions for the distributed server can be found here.

How to check the compilation

Read more…​

We require maven version 3.6.1 minimum to build the project.

First, clone the repository locally:

    $ git clone [email protected]:apache/james-project.git

Then simply run mvn clean install within this directory to compile the project.

Useful options includes:

• -DskipTests to skip the long to execute resource consuming test suite that requires a docker daemon.

• -T 4 to parallelize the build on several CPUs.

• -Dmaven.javadoc.skip=true to skip the javadoc generation.

How to run James in Docker

Read more…​

We maintain docker distribution for our Guice based applications:

• Guice + Cassandra + RabbitMQ + S3 + OpenSearch (distributed)

• Guice + Cassandra + OpenSearch

• Guice + JPA + Lucene

• Guice + Memory (testing)

Using the CLI

See Manage James via the Command Line for more info.

Develop on James

James requires at least JDK 11 and Maven 3.6.1 to build. Some parts of James are written in Scala so one might need to enable Scala plugin in IDE.

We maintain code examples to help you write your own extensions and wire your own servers.

This page details how to run deployment Tests.

Know more about James design

James comes with a Documentation and Architectural Decision Records.

A more precise description of the Distributed Server architecture can be found here.

Articles for James community

• How to build and publish the website

• How to release via maven release plugin