A new user's experiences

[Marc Chamberlin]

Hello -   I just installed the released version of the James mail server on my system and thought I would pass along some of my experiences along the way and then hopefully solicit some help for a problem that we are experiencing on our testbed system for the James server.....   First of all, let me say I think this project is coming along nicely and I didn't have too much difficulty in getting the basic released version up an running on a Windows box, so you folks deserve a "Well Done"....   Now for a couple suggestions which might make it a bit easier for the next person.....   1. On the installation page at the URL http://jakarta.apache.org/james/install.html under "Step 1" it would have been helpful to have made this statement a link over to the Jakarta binary download pages - http://jakarta.apache.org/site/binindex.html  I had to hunt around a bit in order to find out how to download the code for this project.  I also noted there is no link under the Jakarta source code page for the James project, maybe this should also be corrected, or at least mention why there isn't a link on this page for the James project. The URL I am referring to is at http://jakarta.apache.org/site/sourceindex.html   2. I found the configuration notes at the URL - http://jakarta.apache.org/james/configuration.html too difficult to fully understand... Obviously, a great deal of documentation is still needed ;-) (hey I am a software engineer who also an appreciates the fact that documentation is often the last thing done on a project....) So, I just skimmed over it trying to gleam whatever useful information that I thought might be worth noting... One simple thing that would help would be to add a note defining what N.A. means. It is found throughout the tables under the default values columns. I guessed and came up with two possible meanings, "Not Available" meaning there is no default value for that particular parameter and the integrator should be concerned about it and supply a value; the other possible meaning I thought of is "Not Applicable" meaning the integrator doesn't need to worry about supplying a value for that parameter.... I wasn't sure which possible meaning was meant, so I took the lazy approach and didn't do anything with those parameters, for now.... I will come back to this later on, an will probably be asking further questions...   Other than these two small hiccups, I have managed to install the James mail server and get it up an running, for a little while.... So here is where I need to solicit some help.... I set up a single mail user without any difficulty, and I then configured some client applications to work with the James server.... I then tested sending and receiving mail with both Netscape Communicator and Microsoft's Outlook Express and again everything worked OK.. Another client application that I set up is a mail checker program called PopIt that checks the James mailserver for incoming mail, for my single mail user, every 5 minutes.... This seems to run for awhile, but after a bit, the James server stops responding to it, and from that point on, no client application works with the James mail server.... The solution so far is to stop an restart the server....  I did some nosing around a found the log files for the server and browsed through them, but it wasn't too helpful.... The one clue that appears comes from the info.log file and I have included the tail of this log below.... So, can I get one (or more) of you James wizards to volunteer a bit of time an help me track down what might be the problem? What should be my next step in debugging this?  Is there a way to turn on additional debugging flags, or another way to test the server?       Marc   From the tail of info.log, except for the last line, this pattern repeats quite a bit and I suspect it is because the PopIt mail checker was querying the server every 5 minutes ....   2001.05.15 10:46:57 980 (DEBUG) from SocketManager: ServerSocketAcceptor on port 110: request arrived 2001.05.15 10:46:58 040 (DEBUG) from TimeManager: Alarm org.apache.james.pop3server.POP3Handler@29428e set by org.apache.james.pop3server.POP3Handler@29428e 2001.05.15 10:46:58 530 (DEBUG) from TimeManager: Alarm org.apache.james.pop3server.POP3Handler@29428e resetted 2001.05.15 10:46:58 920 (DEBUG) from TimeManager: Alarm org.apache.james.pop3server.POP3Handler@29428e resetted 2001.05.15 10:46:59 360 (DEBUG) from TimeManager: Alarm org.apache.james.pop3server.POP3Handler@29428e resetted 2001.05.15 10:47:00 560 (DEBUG) from TimeManager: Alarm org.apache.james.pop3server.POP3Handler@29428e removed 2001.05.15 10:51:57 990 (DEBUG) from SocketManager: ServerSocketAcceptor on port 110: request arrived 2001.05.15 10:51:57 990 (DEBUG) from TimeManager: Alarm org.apache.james.pop3server.POP3Handler@50a5d9 set by org.apache.james.pop3server.POP3Handler@50a5d9 2001.05.15 10:51:58 040 (DEBUG) from TimeManager: Alarm org.apache.james.pop3server.POP3Handler@50a5d9 resetted 2001.05.15 10:51:58 040 (DEBUG) from TimeManager: Alarm org.apache.james.pop3server.POP3Handler@50a5d9 resetted 2001.05.15 10:51:58 040 (DEBUG) from TimeManager: Alarm org.apache.james.pop3server.POP3Handler@50a5d9 resetted 2001.05.15 10:51:58 100 (DEBUG) from TimeManager: Alarm org.apache.james.pop3server.POP3Handler@50a5d9 removed 2001.05.15 10:56:57 330 (ERROR) from SocketManager: Exception on port 110: socket closed     ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A man said unto the universe -  "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the universe  "I do not see where that creates in me a sense of an obligation."           - Stephen Crane