Re: SOAP over SMTP

[Jason Essington]

Steve

I have continued this thread from the axis-user list here because this seems a more appropriate forum.

On Monday, November 18, 2002, at 12:21 PM, Steve Loughran wrote:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jason Essington" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 11:04 AM
Subject: Re: SOAP over SMTP

Steve

Some of the handlers could be easily made a part of axis, but the MBean
that actually checks the email is fairly jboss specific, and it depends
on the JBoss' mail service. also the authentication (xml digital
signature) is somewhat JBossSX bound.

I certainly need to have this functionality in the client portion as
well, but I took the more familiar (to me) route to get a server
working.

Hopefully as I gain a more complete understanding of how all the parts
work together I will be able to decouple some of the JBoss specific
stuff.

Its always easier to start from where you know. isolating how messages get
into the system (or out) from how the SMTP transport's mail state is managed
would be a good thing.

It would certainly be nice to have an email transport as an integral
part of axis, If you or anyone else can make suggestions on how to
convert the jboss bound parts I will gladly write some code.

well, for a start we cant put GPL code into axis, so you'd need to release
it on both.

Licenses, especially the open source type confuse me :-/
As I am currently the only author of these classes I don't suppose that would be a problem.

Otherwise, when you are ready, come onto axis-dev and start discussing it.
I'd quite like SMTP support where the server could actually poll a POP3
mailbox for messages as well as hook into things like James or other mail
systems. If we do it that way you dont need integral SMTP in your web
service, you just need to configure it to fetch mail from somewhere using
the mailapi.

This is pretty much exactly what I am currently doing. The email details are handled by the javamail api. An email session (with default store and transport) is looked up in jndi.

Really the difficult part about an email transport is authenticating(and optionally securing) the message. HTTP is easy there is basic or digest authentication and security can be had by using HTTPS, but none of this is possible via email (SMTP). So, I have figured that authentication and security (encryption) could be handled with the help of the apache XML-Security library. I am still working out the details, but I think if it is done properly, messages sent via email could be at least as secure as messages traveling via HTTPS.

I am curious if their is already an effort to implement XML-Security into AXIS in a transport agnostic sort of way?

-jason