Re: James/Thunderbird

Hello Hiran,

although kind of late I still like to reply:

1) Which version to use?
IIRC the spring version is deprecated and subject to be removed in 4.0. 
So the preferred version to use is the guice build.
Starting it requires a bit more effort than just call
<james>/bin/james start
as with the spring build.
For the jpa version please refer to 
https://james.apache.org/server/install/guice-jpa.html

As for configuration: Yes, it takes a bit to bring them into  a working 
state. Unfortunate with the recent updates the documentation become a 
bit rough for newcomers - the older versions had a lot more explaining 
comments. As for current versions refer to 
https://james.apache.org/server/config.html
You should be able to figure out what to change from a clean install to 
get James working - but I recommend looking at these configs:
dnsservice
domainlist
imapserver
pop3server
smtpserver
and most important: mailletcontainer

2) Check for mails
By default the jpa-guice version uses a local derbyDB. As I use a 
mysql/mariadb backend I can't tell you how to access and check the local 
derbyDB but I'm sure others can.

As an overall starting point for jpa-spring with 3.8 on opensuse 15.5 I 
refer to my last new-year mail: 
https://lists.apache.org/thread/h96qbl975cof7474f4ybn2q1nhwbgk7f
Since I moved to opensuse 15.6 and switched over to guice-jpa and also 
finally got the firewall to do the port redirection to have james not 
run with root - but I don't have a complete write-up on hand.
If you still require help I can give you some input about my current setup.


A happy new year 2025 to everyone.

as always: greetings from germany

Matt


Am 23.11.24 um 02:04 schrieb Hiran Chaudhuri:
> Hello there.
>
> Every couple of years I need to develop some email-sending application,
> and every time I simply install James to receive SMTP email and provide
> it via IMAP to Thunderbird, where I can inspect and show the emails to
> others.
> This time, for the first time, I run into issues.
>
> 1) There is not one download file but three. No big explanation which is
> which or when to choose which. So I decided for
> james-server-jpa-guice.zip
> <https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.lua/james/server/3.8.1/james-server-jpa-guice.zip>. 
>
> But unfortunately I cannot run it - the whole bin directory is missing.
> So I tried james-server-app-3.8.1-app.zip
> <https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.lua/james/server/3.8.1/james-server-spring-app-3.8.1-app.zip>. 
>
> Got it, the bin directory is there but many complaints come from the
> default settings which are not yet good. Some hint in the readme is
> helpful to generate keystore and launch James - but I remember never
> having to read anything.
>
> 2) I brought up James, added a domain and a user. Both Thunderbird as
> well as my application can send SMTP email to that user. At least I
> believe so, as there are corresponding messages in the logs.
> But when Thunderbird tries to refresh the incoming mails via IMAP the
> folder is always empty. So I suspect something is fishy on the IMAP side.
>
> Questions:
>
> Could this effect be caused by my downloading the wrong distribution or
> having the config not right?
>
> How can I dump a user's the mailbox content just to make sure the inbox
> contains my message?
>
> What would be the way to troubleshoot IMAP in James? Can I increase the
> log levels and get to these details?
>
>
> Hiran
>