Recently, we need to upgrade the email server of our office, which is deemed to be tooooo old and the server hardware seems to be causing of some problem. And there is a need to integrate some spam filtering option into the mail server. I’ve been googling around. I’ve found SpamAssasin is one of the choice of having spam filtering capability to be incorporated into the sendmail on Linux box.
But SpamAssassin seems to be needing lots of PEARL script editing, which PEARL is simply not my cup of tea. Anyway, a thought flashed across my mind of using Apache James email server, as I’ve been a Java programmer and been pretty familiar with the J2EE server side, especially dealing with J2EE and Tomcat. So, I think James could do all the good job that I want. After downloading James, I found it presents pretty much similarity to configure Apache Tomcat. Furthermore, it comes with couple of default Mailets, which one of them, the BayesianAnalysis mailet is something that I’m keen to explore.
The first impression of the Apache James is it gives me the kind of flexibility of developing further mailets for different kind of customization, such as possibility of using Java/J2EE integrating it to our backend system for pulling data from our Oracle DB server. It also gives the kind of flexibility of having user accounts and mail content (Inbox, sendbox) etc to be stored on RDBMS such as MySQL instead on plain file. I like this method better as it shall give better and easier maintenance for any filtering or cleaning or backing up of data. Besides, there are also couple of Web-based GUI interface that allows to talk to the James’ Remote Manager. One of them is yaJamesManager. I’ll need to explore more on James then I’ll come back to post here for further information.
