Google Summer of Code 2008 - Apache James email Projects

The Apache James team have submitted two proposed student projects for Google Summer of Code 2008, you can read them here.

In brief they are:

1) Develop a VERP Mailet to allow James to write VERP modified return addresses on outbound messages, and an inbound mailet/matcher to identify VERP bounces and invoke configurable "do something" code.

And 2) James' provided mailing list manager is fine for small closed groups, but lacks the functionality of a more robust MLM, the project is to add some all or more of the following features subscriber and message moderation, double opt-in and bounce handling.

Spread the word, James needs Students!

Storing MIME email in JCR with James and Jackrabbit

I read a post on the James dev list that mentioned this blog posting which goes into some detail of the method Jukka Zitting used to create a JCR message repository (using Apache Jackrabbit) for Apache James in the James sandbox. I thought this would be a good excuse to mention that work here.

I find it an exciting idea because it takes the inherently richly structured MIME messages and stores them in a way that can cope with the full richness of the structure including the mixture of content types, the recursion of nesting, and the mixture of encodings and character sets supported very well by the totally fan-bloody-tastic MIME spec. In fact JCR is much more aptly suited to storing MIME structures than a traditional RDBMS or the filesystem because it is flexible in the right ways and can also manage the metadata.

The expensive act of parsing the MIME message is only carried out once, when the message is exploded into the store, and thereafter the whole message, or just specific parts of it, can be passed around as a serialisable reference to a location rather than as unserialisable streams, or big byte[]'s.

What's more any system that can manipulate the JCR repository can become involved in the life of the messages, for example web mail stops being a web interface for traditional mail protocols and becomes a first class citizen, web applications built straight ontop of the repository.

Add Web Services and the repository can participate in CRM systems which use WS to integrate channels and systems into a single Agent Desktop and a Single Customer View.

The fact that Jukka made the James JCR repository (with an html viewer as well) in a few hours at Apachecon EU is testament to the suitability of JCR, the extensibility of JAMES and the value of the Hackathon as a tool for innovation.

Have a look at the code here or subscribe to the server-dev@james.apache.org list to discuss it.

New Chair for Apache James PMC

Its been a long holiday, and I meant to blog this much sooner, but I've been too busy hanging out with the family.
On December 19th the ASF board passed a motion to recognise the change of the Apache James PMC chair from Serge Knystautas to myself.
This is a big honour for me, and I intend to work hard in 2008 to live up to the example Serge has set.
I haven't much to say about James right now, but I'm sure I will be saying more as the months progress.

Bugger off! email is still great.

Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email

Bollocks to you, I say, email is still a great productivity tool. We're just starving it of attention, and innovation, because we can't be bothered solving the problem of spam.

IM is not email 2.0, and it is high time we figured out what email 2.0 should be.

James power MarkMail

I blogged the other day about a cool new list archive tool, MarkMail.

Well it turns out that the man behind it is Jason Hunter, and he was kind enough to post this message to the James list the other day.

Turns out that it is none other than our own Apache James that is the spider in the middle of the web, handling all the mail, with, I assume, bespoke mailets converting them into XML and storing them in the the Mark Logic server.

Nice one Jason, and thanks for sharing.

I wonder what other people are doing with James? Do you have a James case study I could share? If so get in touch!

Open Source, Spectrum of liberty

I just read Stefano Mazzocchi's post "On Version Control Architectures and the Fear of Displacing Innovation" he paints an eloquent picture of a tension which I'm sure is familiar to most, if not all, contributors to open source projects. How far do we have to constrain what we let each other do in order for our project to have a discrete identity which exceeds the sum of its parts, and at what point towards the libertarian end of the spectrum does our project loose coherence and become equal to or even less than the sum of its parts.

Stefano says "how many potential contributors did we miss because we didn't give them commit access soon enough" and I know exactly what he means. I'd like to broaden the question though, and ask why we choose to encumber ourselves with unweildy processes and centralised infrastructure?

I recently proposed that Apache James could lower the bar to publishing news stories if we used a blog. The ASF doesn't provide any blogging infrastructure, and if we used an off-site service, such as blogger (as used to publish this blog), it would be a "turnkey" operation and not involve Apache infrastructure in any effort. However my proposal has been met by a resounding "Hmmm... I'm not sure..." with most of the reservations being around hosting official content off-site. To me there seem to be many concrete benefits and very few drawbacks with out-sourcing this function and I was surprised that others didn't share my point of view.

So reading Stefano's post made me wonder, why *do* we feel that we have to control the infrastructure in order to "own" the project? Why do we want even to consider expending our limited resources on hosting for ourselves services which we can have for free?

Ok Initially we had to own the infrastructure so that we could operate the services we needed, and, yes, today we could argue that we want to retain full control over certain key services, websites, email, source control. But I always believed that the Apache Way was about community, proven processes and best practice, a brand and some world class products.

Don't take this the wrong way, I know that ASF infrastructure is vital to the ability of the projects to operate, and that it will never be possible for me to repay the people who set it up and who volunteer to maintain it on our behalf, but I never really thought the infrastructure was anything other than the key enabler. We have dozens of people hosting mirrors of our downloads, and no one complains about that, why would they, it benefits everyone.

Using a no-cost off-site service doesn't IMHO automatically compromise your reputation or undermine the moral authority of your message.

Apache James At Apachecon US 07

== UPDATE ==
I've had to withdraw this talk, because it coincided to closely with the New Job. Sorry.

===

My Talk "Apache James - The Complete Email Application Platform" has been accepted for Apachecon US 07 in Atlanta on the 15th of November at 15:00. Be there!

If you didn't see me at Apachecon EU 07 in May you can look forward to a description of the major features and components of the Apache James mail server, with a focus on how the modular architecture can enable extending, customising and embedding of email functionality into systems and products of all kinds with an email related need.
If you want to integrate email with your enterprise systems, or want to add an open source email application server to your J2EE stack this talk is for you.

Since I first gave the talk in Amsterdam in May life and art have converged, the Mailet API has its own sub-project and the componentisation of James' trunk has proceeded along very similar lines to those anticipated by that talk.

I will be presenting the same outline but with some added detail, news of progress and further plans from the James team, so even if you heard me in Amsterdam I'm sure I will have things to say which will interest you.

Mime4J version 0.3 released

The Apache JAMES team is pleased to announce the release of Apache
Mime4J version 0.3. Apache Mime4J mime4j provides parsing for e-mail
message streams in plain rfc822 and MIME format.

The 0.3 release is the first official release under The Apache Software
Foundation umbrella.

Distributions are available from the download page here:
* http://james.apache.org/download.cgi

More information on Apache Mime4j can be found at the Apache JAMES
project site:
* http://james.apache.org/mime4j/index.html

The released packages will be also deployed to the central maven
repositories in the next days.

My James slides from Apachecon EU07

Slides from my Apachecon EU talk on James can now be found here

Mailet Site goes up

Thanks to everyone who helped, we now have a site for the Mailet API.

Apache Mailet API lives

We've just finished setting up subversion and the build stuff for the Mailet API sub project of James.

There are still tasks to complete:

1. Fix james-server trunk before the next nightly build
2. Change the server website "mailet" links
3. Create some decent content for the API website
   
4. Get the web-site updated
5. sort the svn commit emails so they go to the right list
6. release the current version from the sub-project.

However its a big step, and one I've been looking forward to since James became a TLP.

Talk done

img_6490.jpg, originally uploaded by herberts.

Gave my talk on James yesterday, I'm not sure how it went, I can never tell. However its done now. I could've done with less material, or more time, which isn't such a bad thing.
If it gets accepted for Apachecon US 07 I'll definitely rationalise it a bit.

Hackathon

Hackathon, originally uploaded by ki113rb33s.

Well I got here, after a 1hr delay to my flight, and a further delay while the pilot drove round the airport looking for a parking place. "There's a space over there dad" we all yelled.

And lo! The hackathon is already progress.

Apache JAMES Server 2.3.1 released

The Apache JAMES project is happy to announce the final version
of JAMES Server 2.3.1. This is a bugfix release. You should upgrade as soon as possible.


JAMES Server 2.3.1 can be downloaded at:

http://james.apache.org/download.cgi


The bugfixes / tasks since 2.3.0 are:

* Remove ordb.org from docs
* OOM caused by unbounded cache in InetAddress (was James leaks memory slowly)
* sendmail.py doesn't handle multiple TO-recipient
* sendmail.py crashes on line "from_addr = os.environ['USER'] + '@' + socket.getfqdn()"
* ServerConnection doesn't properly handle the TCP/IP backlog
* Search & Fix broken links on the new website
* MBoxMailRepository.remove(String key) causes ClassCastException
* Failure to correctly set mail.smtp.localhost leads to mail servers
being listed on cbl.abuseat.org and mail being rejected by Spamhaus.
* MailAddress not check for valid syntax if new MailAddress(user, domain) is used
* sendmail.py use localhost to connect to local smtpserver. We should use 127.0.0.1
* exporting variables using build.sh on solaris breaks
* James will not start if there is directory with too many files and folders in the repostiory path
* python/sendmail.py is not added to the binary distribution package

* Update license headers to follow the latest ASF requirements as of November the 1st
* Merge 2.3.0a1 to 2.3.0 final releases on JIRA
* Upgrade dnsjava to 2.0.3 when available
* Add documentation for the dns ttl issue
* Make sure our container use an expiration for cached dns data


For more information see the changelog page.

Apache James Team

Apache James at Apachecon US 2007

Well the Call For Papers for Apachecon US 2007 is now open:

• The Call for Papers is now open for ApacheCon US, to be held November
• 12-16 at the Peachtree Westin, Atlanta. The conference will consist
• of two day of tutorials (November 12-13) and three days of regular
• conference sessions (November 14-16).
• Please log in to the website at http://apachecon.com/html/login.html
• to submit your proposal.

I've submitted the talk on James which I'm giving in Amsterdam on May 2nd.

Apache James at Apachecon EU 2007

While I'm blogging I ought to tell you that I finished, and submitted, the slides for my talk on Apache James at Apachecon EU 2007 and let me tell you, if you like diagrams you're in for a treat!

Now I need to put some polish on the lyrics.

James - Google Summer Of Code 2007

Google Summer of Code '07 will soon be accepting applications from students.

If you have an idea for a student to work on as a James SoC project send it to general@james.apache.org or post it on this wiki

If you are a student and want to submit an application to google about James, please discuss it on the general@james.apache.org mailinglist as well.

Not only do we have a lot of knowledge about what James needs (and doesn't need) we also have two years of experience of evaluating the proposals and experience mentoring two former SoC students.

We can help you to polish your application, and introduce you to our project.

James missed out on a SoC '06 student so I want to make sure we do everything we can to get good proposals and have them accepted.

Personality cult

Loyal followers of my personality cult (current membership:1) will be overwhelmed to learn that I'm interviewed in Feathercast 24 at www.feathercast.org (I don't know how to insert links when I post from my phone. -update: blogger seems to take care of it for me, now I want to know how to add labels.)
I talk about Apache James, why I like it and where I think we're going with it.
Respect to David for making me sound coherent and sensible, even though I talk for 24 minutes (and thats after its been edited) without taking a breath!
If you enjoy listening to me I suggest you listen to some of the others, where he and Rich talk to actual smart people. :-)

jSPF passes all the tests

James developers are currently voting to release jSPF-0.9b4. This release passes all the tests at www.openspf.org

If you want to try it out before its released the rc is here Remember to let us know what you think of it.

Mailet API getting some independance

In the past the Mailet API has been managed within the Apache James Server project. You could always get the api separately but it was managed in the James Server lifecycle.

Today the votes were counted and the API will soon be taking its rightful place as a James subproject.

We'll start small, by releasing the current version, and move on to look at the enhancements we've been discussing over on mailet-api@james.apache.org.

Eventually I hope we'll add things like a Reference implementation independent of James Server and suitable for embedding, an SDK, and possibly a TCK.

If you want to get involved subscribe to mailet-api@james.apache.org and speak up.