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by Alan Williamson.
Original Post: High-Availability JavaMail: I am not sure the point
Feed Title: Technical @ alan.blog-city.com
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Feed Description: (Technical) the rants of a java developer trapped in the body of a java developer!
I read about the HA-JavaMail project this morning and on the face of it, looks very impressive. Claiming much increased performance over the standard JavaMail can surely only be a good thing. But this is the bit that I am little confused at; don't most people simply use JavaMail to relay to another mail server for further delivery?
At first I thought this software done away with the need to have a relay server, but looking at the documentation it doesn't seem to be that. Maybe it does. If so then fantastic. No need to keep a secure sendmail server kicking around. Although if its not, then why bother? The transport between JavaMail -> sendmail is more than adequate for the majority of applications, unless you're in the business of sending out a serious amount of email on a repeated cycle.
You can use regular javamail without a relay server. I've just been setting the mail.smtp.host property to the mx record for the domain. Sometimes it doesn't work, and then I pass the email on to a qmail relay, because if the reply code says something like "mailbox full, try again later" I don't feel like remembering to try again later... qmail can queue it up for me. I ran into HA javamail looking around for a java implementation of qmqp...
Lots of people are in the business of sending out serious amounts of email on a repeated basis, so this could be quite usefull. Even just system emails from a large webapp could be a pretty high volume, combine that with regular marketing emails and you have a major effort on your hands. Performance/scalability are huge issues.
I'm curious how this HA-JavaMail thing works though, I couldn't find much documentation. His example code doesn't even use his packages which doesn't make any sense to me. oh well. I suppose I can just read the ha source...
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