1) How do we know they are compatible?
Thats the nightmare for you! not only do you have to conform to the java mail spec but also to the miriad RFC's for mail.
Yep - that's why I'm seeking help :-)
We have a lot of knowedge about how the stds should be implemented, but not a test kit of any kind.
One problem I have is that the spec and API doc are not always clear about what should be done - e.g. from the JavaDoc for InternetAddress.validate():
"The current implementation checks many, but not all, syntax rules."
It would be nice to know what was supposed to be checked and what wasn't.
I am hoping the JavaMail TCK can clear some of these things up, but empirical knowledge (which I don't have, I'm no mail expert) would help.
It is certainly reasonable to use James as a testbed, James' architecture provides several points at which test cases could be inserted.
Any chance you could point me in the general direction?
Its probably worth restating the enormity of the task, for the spec and an impl you'd have to test conformance with RFC's for:
domain names email addresses POP SMTP & ESMTP (for both send and receive) NNTP IMAP Message format MIME - including providing handlers for at least a few common content types, especially the gruesome multipart/* ones.
For Geronimo we can cut back on this a little - the J2EE specification only requires that we provide a transport that supports addresses of type InternetAddress and messages of type MimeMessage; we do not need to support any store protocols.
However, for this to be of general use I agree that we should provide good implementations of as many of these as we can.
James relies on JavaMail to provide a lot of this, simply because the effort of producing reliable conformant implementations far outweighs the benefit of "ownership". Why re-invent the wheel when there weren't a great many of the JavaMail classes we'd like to change? Though I think that if it made proper use of interfaces as types we'd be more inclined to replace some of the key ones.
2) Transport providers, especially SMTP
James uses the sun RI ones, but we have some issues with them and would like to have the resources to write our one ones. Sadly we haven't done so yet.
I can understand that the licence is an issue, we had an issue with it which we resolved by only distributing them with binaries. I also think we'd be happy to collaborate, I'm much less sure how much we can realistically offer beyond our knowedge.
Knowledge and expertise alone will help a lot.
-- Jeremy
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