[Building Sakai] James email issues

[Soo-il Kim]

Maybe my experience with James and Mailtool would be related to your
issue. When I was in BU, we had to deal with big volume of
simultaneous mail-sending requests (e.g >500~1000 from one recipient,
same message, ..., that is similar to spam but not spam.) We managed
to send out that kind of messages in timely manner by increase the
spooler and connections in Sendmail MTA.

Ok... as far as I know, Sakai mail-sending mechanism is pretty simple:
Just sending out to MTA which is usually Sendmail or Postfix. Every
institutes have their own email messagehandling/routing mechanism. You
have to make sure how many simultaneous messages can be allowed in
your institute's SMTP server. If that server takes big enough number
of connections.

Actually first of all, you should not have smtp.enabled=true in
sakai.properties if you use other SMTP server. this setting turns on
James mail server which is built-in with Sakai distribution.

SOO

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 10:45 PM, Joshua Swink <joshua.swink at gmail.com> wrote:
> We've had a few email issues and I just wanted to run them by the list
> in case other people have dealt with the same problems.
>
> 1) When messages are unspooled and sent out, it tries to send them to
> the server named in the email address rather than using our configured
> SMTP server. In other words if the message is intended for
> "user at ucmerced.edu" it tries to connect to ucmerced.edu port 25. This
> does not work, obviously.
>
> 2) About every other message is spooled. There's no apparent reason
> for this, and nothing in the tomcat or the james log. We're talking
> about 1 message per minute coming in at most.
>
> 3) We had one incident where the incoming connections to James (from
> our email relay servers) were piling up in CLOSE_WAIT state. After 30
> of them piled up, it was impossible for mail to be delivered to Sakai
> any more. The connections did not close until I restarted Sakai.
>
> I am going to change all of the logging in James' environment.xml to
> DEBUG. It would be especially helpful if there were any other places
> that debugging output could be turned on.
>
> --
> Joshua Swink
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