> I'm still super new to James, but again, loving every bit of it. > I'm kind of > wondering what practical uses you all have found for the fetchpop > functionality... is it there so you can use james as a mail processor for > email that is collected by a different mail server or what? I'm trying to > get my brain in the proper location to start thinking about all of the > different uses for James, but this feature kinda jumped out at me.
Kenny, I added fetchpop becuase a number of messages to this list over the last year had asked how to make james fetch mail from POP accounts. The principle is simple, James will periodically retrieve the contents of a POP mailbox (or several), extract sender and recipients from the message headers and insert the message into the spool exactly as if it had been recieved by SMTP. Its primarily aimed at small users who have perhaps signed up for some kind of mail account which doesn't allow for forwarding (or only at a cost) these people can use James to collect this mail from a single catch-all account and re-distribute it by forwarding or providing user accounts on James. A case study: I personally use it to handle mail to @mailet.org, I registered the domiain for the usual knock down price and get a single POP mailbox free, anything more complex will cost me more. Eventually I'll pay for full control of DNS, but in the meantime I can still manage the mail. Another potential benefit is that by using fetchpop mail is cached externally, and James can retrieve it when it is "up", meaning that for users where downtime, or poor connectivity, is an issue there is an element of robustness in their mail. Where I live and work, Scotland a relatively rich developed country, there is very poor provision of broadband (I live in an area where ADSL isn't even on the horizon yet), and pretty poor access to ISDN for large areas of the country, many people live too far from exchanges, I'm *only just* within the 1km limit yet I'm also 10 minutes from an international Airport and 30 minutes from a major city. There are a significant number of small companies who could make very good use of their own internal mailserver, don't have reliable always-on connections, and do have external POP accounts. In many ways this is for them. I'm lucky in that I can live here, yet work in "cyberspace" with clients from London to San Fransisco for companies who's offices are mainly for show and keeping the books in, but this leveling effect of the net is only as good as the telecom infrastructure, I hope fetchpop will help someone else like me overcome its limitations. :-) One heads up is that it will choke on a mail with a badly formed recipient or sender addresses, and stop processing that whole account, this is bad, but fixable. d. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:james-user-unsubscribe@;jakarta.apache.org> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:james-user-help@;jakarta.apache.org>
