Configuring Apache JAMES as LiveCycle's Mail Server

During the development phase, LiveCycle developers sometimes require an e-mail server to test mail functionality. It might be too much paperwork to get corporate IT to provision additional e-mail accounts for test purposes on the corporate mail server. In such cases, Apache's JAMES mail server comes in very handy. It is a light-weight mail server built using Java that you can run locally on your laptop/desktop without any external dependencies. It requires about 30 MB of RAM. JAMES is an acronym for Java Apache Mail Enterprise Server.

To get it to work, the following steps are required:

- Download it from Apache's JAMES website
- Extract the .zip file to a suitable location. No install is required
- Make sure that the environment variable JAVA_HOME is poroperly set to the right JDK
- To start JAMES, navigate to the /bin folder and run run.bat from a command prompt

- By default, JAMES listens on port 4555 for its Remote Manager Service. This service lets you configure JAMES. It uses the IANA-assigned default ports for POP3 (110) and SMTP (25).

- To add users, telnet to JAMES from a command prompt using the following command:
telnet localhost 4555
The default administrator user is 'root' with password 'root'

- Use the folowing command to list all available commands:
help

- Add a user (livecycle) with password (password) using the following command:
adduser livecycle password

- Add an additional user (user1/password) for verification purposes

- Verify using the following command:
listusers

- Logout using the command quit.

- Download Mozilla's Thunderbird mail client and install it. You can also use Microsoft Outlook.
- Configure the accounts livecycle and user1. The respective e-mail addresses would be livecycle@localhost and user1@localhost
- Send mail from one to the other and vice versa and verify that both work.