Architecture

James is a multi-protocol message processing and storage engine. James currently consists of:

  • two mail prototcol servers (SMTP and POP3),
  • a remote administration server,
  • an NNTP server,
  • a mail processing engine that supports the Mailet API
  • file-system message storage and a message storage interface to RDBMS's
  • file-system user record storage and an experimental interface to LDAP directories
  • support for TLS (SSL) for POP3 and remote administration
  • support for SMTP auth

James is built on top of Avalon, the Java Apache Server Framework. Versions 2.0 of James use a date-snapshot of Avalon code as of November 2001. The lib directory includes date-stamped jars of the various Avalon libraries. We intend to stay current with new versions of Avalon as they are released.