Re: James 3.4.0 do not receive e-mail at all

Hi David,

well, although I as just another user of James can't come up with any 
technical explanation why you got that issue I had similar issues when I 
first used James back with 3.0-beta5 (or some like this - it's been long 
since). Communicating with the SMTP/IMAP/POP3 servers James starts up 
shouldn't be any issue as James doesn't fully start up if there're any 
issues on the enabled servers (you can enable and disable each module on 
it's own by it's respective config). So if you got James fully up and 
running at least the start up could load and start all enabled modules.
As I learned over the years James can be really iffy to even accept 
mails by SMTP when you try to drop a mail addressed to a non-existent 
account. I don't know if you can set up an user-account for a different 
domain wich isn't added to its domain list - but as far as I know you 
have to first correctly add the domain before you can add an 
user-account for that domain. The default domain is set to "localhost" 
by config, so only mail-addresses in the form <username>@localhost are 
allowed. Also: If you were successful to login to IMAP at least you had 
the account you tried at least set up so it was actually recognized by 
James. About SMTP + Java: I noticed an issue with the official Java (now 
Jakarta) Mail API lib: Unless the SMTP server lists AUTH in its greeting 
AND the property mail.smtp.auth is set to true (wich default is false - 
for what ever reason(?!)) the SMTP client isn't even try to login into 
the SMTP (performing a SMTP AUTH) but drops in a mail like it would 
connect from the outside to drop in a mail for a local account. I don't 
know how other mail clients handle this - but to make James to list AUTH 
you have to set the "authRequired" setting to "announce" like it's 
explained in the comment right above it. Althogh this should only affect 
when you try to connect from the outside and want to send an e-mail to 
some other destination it may could also affect local stuff - depends on 
the other configs.
I'm sorry no one reacted to your initial request. I'm not regular a 
member of this list but only if I have a question myself (as you mention 
it: I didn't got a reply to my recent question either - nvm) - mostly 
because many topics I'm not interested in. Just what a coincidence we 
had twice the topic about this issue back to back.
What I don't yet understand - but as said, I'm not a dev: The log shows 
that the mail dropped via SMTP was successfully spooled for delievery 
but didn't got through to the inbox. If you try to deliever a mail to a 
remote destination James usually tries a few times and when it gives up 
you a) receive an error message and b) the log has some very destinct 
error message about it. In all other cases it's always worth to look 
into the <james>/var/mail directories. This is where e-mails land that 
had some issues while processing. There're 5 directories: address-error, 
error, over-quota-error, relay-denied and spam. Usual the folder it 
lands in tells something about the issue that caused it. I don'T know 
for sure, but about logging: I guess it may be possible to re-set the 
logging level so pretty much anything James does get's logged. This may 
could be helpful as it has to have some specific reason why the SMTP 
accepts the mail but fails to process it.

I'm looking forward to hearing from you when you got some time. May I 
can help, or maybe, if I'm writing nonesense, someone with some more 
knowledge will stop and correct me. But as already noted in my last 
mail: I'm pretty confident that we (the list) should be able to solve 
that issue and get you (both) up and running with James.

Matt

Am 04.03.2020 um 11:07 schrieb [email protected]:
> hi Matt
>
> Some clarification:-
>
> I've not got past setting up an experimental James based setup on localhost ie my home linux laptop. I did have it running about a month ago and it looked fine, except that test mails were spooled (according to the logs) yet never delivered. I had James configured (correctly I think!) to use maildir, so this was presumably not a database issue.
>
> As with Ahmet, I saw no evidence of errors in the logs and since no one replied to initial help requests I gave up.
>
> I think I can rule out general non-James related email/firewall issues as I'm experienced as a sys admin and have run my own email server (dovecot and exim based) for nearly 10 years. I have a couple of cloud VMs, so once I get James going again at home I can possibly test it on one of them with a non-critical domain.
>
> The dovecot/exim set up I use for real works fine so I'm not really looking to replace it as I have a lot of experience with both of those beasts. Main motivation is that I maintain a java based webmail client and I'd be interested in being able to document use cases besides my own.
>
> This webmail client (I run it in tomcat) incidentally had no issues with the imap side of James - I could authenticate, create maildir mailboxes and store and read test emails to myself in the outbox folder; these tests just never reached the inbox. The problem definitely wasn't an issue with the webmail as I did a test talking SMTP on port 25 and again, mail was spooled but never reached the inbox.
>
> I'll try and post more later this week and meanwhile, thank you for taking an interest.
>
> --
> David Matthews
> [email protected]
>
>
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