This document covers every changes an Ops needs to be aware of when running James.
The following procedures are to take as it, and the Apache Software Foundation, nor its contributors, can not be responsible for any damages generated by following the below procedures.
Before performing these operations, you should ensure to have the skills to conduct the operations, and you should read other software documentation. Do not follow this guide blindly!
Note: this section is in progress. It will be updated during all the development process until the release.
Changes to apply between 3.4.x and 3.5.x will be reported here.
Change list:
- [LinShare blob export mechanism should rely on delegation](#LinShare blob export mechanism should rely on delegation)
- RabbitMQ minimal version
- Enforce usernames to be lower cased
- Cassandra keyspace creation configuration
- UsersFileRepository
- ElasticSearch performance enhancements
- JAMES-2703 Post 3.4.0 release removals
- Health checks routes return code changes
- User mailboxes reIndexing endpoint change
- Hybrid blobStore replaces Union blobStore
- New forbidden set of characters in Usernames local part
- UidValidity and maildir
- UidValidity and JPA or Cassandra
- Differentiation between domain alias and domain mapping
- ProtocolSession storng typing
- Tune Cassandra time serie tables options
- LogEnabled removal
Date 20/03/2020
SHA-1 XXX
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-3122
Concerned product: Spring
As Log4J 1.x is not compatible with Java 9+ runtime, we adopted Log4J2 as a logging solution for the Spring product.
As a consequence, the deprecated LogEnabled
API will be removed. We recommend extension developers to obtain their
Logger instance using the SLF4J LoggerFactory
class instead.
Date 18/03/2020
SHA-1 XXX
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-3121
Impacted product: Guice distributed James
Our usage of Cassandra for the time series have been improved by fine tuning the compaction strategy and the read repair option.
In order to unlock these improvements we advise you running the following commands on existing instalations
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.deletedMailsV2 WITH compaction = { 'class' : 'TimeWindowCompactionStrategy' };
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.enqueuedMailsV3 WITH compaction = {'compaction_window_size': '1',
'compaction_window_unit': 'HOURS',
'class': 'org.apache.cassandra.db.compaction.TimeWindowCompaction' };
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.applicableFlag WITH compaction = { 'class' : 'SizeTieredCompactionStrategy' };
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.attachmentMessageId WITH compaction = { 'class' : 'SizeTieredCompactionStrategy' };
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.attachmentV2 WITH compaction = { 'class' : 'SizeTieredCompactionStrategy' };
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.firstUnseen WITH compaction = { 'class' : 'SizeTieredCompactionStrategy' };
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.mailboxCounters WITH compaction = { 'class' : 'SizeTieredCompactionStrategy' };
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.mailboxRecents WITH compaction = { 'class' : 'SizeTieredCompactionStrategy' };
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.messageCounter WITH compaction = { 'class' : 'SizeTieredCompactionStrategy' };
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.messageDeleted WITH compaction = { 'class' : 'SizeTieredCompactionStrategy' };
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.modseq WITH compaction = { 'class' : 'SizeTieredCompactionStrategy' };
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.imapUidTable WITH compaction = { 'class' : 'SizeTieredCompactionStrategy' };
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.messageIdTable WITH compaction = { 'class' : 'SizeTieredCompactionStrategy' };
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.eventStore WITH compaction = { 'class' : 'LeveledCompactionStrategy' };
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.attachmentOwners WITH bloom_filter_fp_chance = 0.01;
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.deletedMailsV2 WITH bloom_filter_fp_chance = 0.01;
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.firstUnseen WITH bloom_filter_fp_chance = 0.01;
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.mailboxCounters WITH bloom_filter_fp_chance = 0.01;
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.messageCounter WITH bloom_filter_fp_chance = 0.01;
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.deletedMailsV2 WITH read_repair_chance = 0.0;
ALTER TABLE james_keyspace.enqueuedMailsV3 WITH read_repair_chance = 0.0;
Date 19/03/2020
SHA-1 58b1d879ab
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-3119
ProtocolSession
have been reworked in order to increase type strengh
and reduce errors.
Now setAttachment
and getAttachment
are expecting an AttachmentKey
as key
and return an Optional
instead of a null
-able value.
Moreover setAttachment
do not allow null
values and removeAttachment
should be use now to remove elements.
Date 10/03/2020
SHA-1 XXX
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-3112
Concerned products: Guice products
We added strong typing for Domain aliases (exposed by this endpoint) to distinguish them from domain mappings (exposed by this endpoint).
Read this page to understand the difference between Domain Alias and Domain Mapping.
As a consequence, existing values returned by the domain alias endpoint (before this fix this is domain mapping) will be considered as domain mappings and might need to be deleted and re-created.
Date 26/02/2020
SHA-1 XXX
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-3074
Concerned products: JPA mailbox backend, Cassandra mailbox backend
Non-Maildir backends could generate '0' uid validity with a low probability, which is invalid regarding RFC-3501. We changed the generation mechanism to use valid UidValidity for newly created mailboxes. Regarding persisted mailboxes, we regenerate invalid UidValidity upon reads.
While this sanitizing is transparent to the end user and the admin, it might lead to rare IMAP client full mailbox resynchronisation. (one chance out of two billions).
Date 26/02/2020
SHA-1 XXX
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-3074
Concerned products: Spring with maildir backend
Maildir generated too big values to conform to RFC-3501. We changed the generation mechanism to use valid UidValidity for newly created mailboxes. Regarding persisted mailboxes, we regenerate invalid UidValidity upon reads.
While this sanitizing is transparent to the end user and the admin, it might lead to IMAP client full resynchronisation.
Date 04/02/2020
SHA-1 XXX
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2950
Even if this set of characters should be allowed for the local part of a Username regarding some context, as defined by the RFC3696#section-3, we decided that for reducing code complexity and more safety to not allow them anymore when creating new Usernames.
However, the read of Usernames already existing with some of those characters is still allowed, to not introduce any breaking change.
Date 12/02/2020
SHA-1 XXX
Concerned products: Guice server, experimental LinShare blob export feature.
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-3040
Blob Export Configuration changed:
File configuration need to be adjusted: blob.properties
-You need to add new mandatory properties when blob.export.implementation
property is set to linshare
:
blob.export.linshare.technical.account.uuid
blob.export.linshare.technical.account.password
-The legacy property blob.export.linshare.token
will not used anymore, you can remove it.
Date 6/01/2020
SHA-1 XXX
Concerned products: Guice distributed James server
Union blobStore, allowing to store older blobs within Cassandra while storing new blobs into object storage, had been removed.
Hybrid blobStore had been replacing it, allowing to store blobs either in a low cost blobStore or in a high performance blobStore, allowing thus some performance improvement for small, often read blobs while big or unfrequently read blobs keeps being stored cheaply.
Users relying on the Union blobStore will need to adopt Hybrid blobStore. Please adjust "blob.properties" accordingly:
implementation=hybrid
Date 16/12/2019
SHA-1 d68a64d96ba8312ecbd34761e82c9c2c32348290
Concerned products: Guice products
In an effort to have a resource oriented webadmin REST API we decided to relocate the endpoint for user mailbox reIndexing.
curl -XPOST /mailboxes?task=reIndex&[email protected]
Had been moved to:
curl -XPOST /users/[email protected]/mailboxes?task=reIndex
Date 10/12/2019
SHA-1 cdbc0ee65f
Concerned products: Guice products
Health check return codes had been changed:
- Degraded James server will now answer 200 instead of 500. JSON payload needs to be read in order to act upon a degraded server.
- Unhealthy James server will now answer 503 instead of 500.
Depending on specific deployment usage of health-checks, management scripts might need to be updated.
Date 26/11/2019
SHA-1 0bf4e8384e
Concerned products: Guice distributed James (rabbitMQ)
The distributed James project (relying on Guice, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, RabbitMQ and optionally Swift) benefits from a new distributed task mananger.
In order to enforce task sequential processing at the cluster level, we rely on a single active consumer, which is a feature introduced in RabbitMQ 3.8.
Users of distributed James product thus need to upgrade their RabbitMQ server to be at least version 3.8.
Date 21/11/2019
SHA-1 9e976d3f49
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2949
Many users recently complained about mails non received when sending to upper cased local recipients. We decided to simplify the handling of case for local recipients and users by always storing them lower cased. Now all the users repositories are storing user in lower case to ensure that. If you previously used to store users in a case sensitive way (which is very unlikely as it is broking delivery), you could need to update your user database to lower case all your users.
Date 15/11/2019
SHA-1 bcf4d36500
In order to allow the usage of cassandra credentials limited to a keyspace, the default behaviour of James is now to NOT create the keyspace during start-up.
The automatic creation of the cassandra keyspace by James could be enabled by setting
cassandra.keyspace.create=true
in the cassandra.properties
configuration file.
Date 08/11/2019
SHA-1 0f8ee6ce2a
This specific user store was deprecated for years. It relied on Java serialization to store directly core.User object.
If you are still using it, you should instead use an other user repository.
If you need to export data from it, please contact us, it could be possible to write a little extraction tool.
Date 10/10/2019
SHA-1 0d72783ff4
JIRAS:
- https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2917
- https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2078
- https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2079
- https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2910
Concerned product: Guice product relying on ElasticSearch
We significantly improved our usage of ElasticSearch. Underlying changes include:
- The use of routing to collocate emails of a same mailbox within a same shard. This enables search queries to avoid cluster level synchronisation, and thus enhance throughput, latencies and scalability.
- Disabling dynamic mapping. We now represent headers as nested objects.
- Removing some not needed fields from the mapping
- No longer index raw HTML. This was possible under some configuration combination, and caused the data stored in elasticSearch to be significantly larger than required.
The downside of these changes is that a reindex is needed, implying a downtime on search:
- Delete the indexes used by James
- Start James in order to create the missing indexes
- Trigger a Full ReIndexing, which can take time to complete.
Date: 25/09/2019
SHA-1: f721747edf8deb50406a5a44f6476507a03e2543
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2703
Concerned products: Spring, default bundled mailets
- Classes marked as deprecated whose removal was planned after 3.4.0 release (See JAMES-2703) had been removed.
This includes:
- SieveDefaultRepository. Please use SieveFileRepository instead.
- JDBCRecipientRewriteTable, XMLRecipientRewriteTable, UsersRepositoryAliasingForwarding, JDBCAlias mailets. Please use RecipientRewriteTable mailet instead.
- JDBCRecipientRewriteTable implementation. Please use JPARecipientRewriteTable instead.
- JamesUsersJdbcRepository, DefaultUsersJdbcRepository. Please use JpaUsersRepository instead.
- MailboxQuotaFixed matcher. Please use IsOverQuota instead.
Changes to apply between 3.3.x and 3.4.x will be reported here.
Change list:
- Upgrade to ElasticSearch 6.3
- Enqueuing several times a mail with the same name
- RabbitMQ Mail Queue with multiple specific headers for a single recipient
Date: 31/07/2019
SHA-1: f19642aef4a67cd6675f66278792ba4aa85d6d6e
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2850
Concerned products: (experimental) RabbitMQ MailQueue
RabbitMQ MailQueue projection in Cassandra relies on a map allowing a single specific header per recipient header. This limitation causes rejection of emails with multiple per-recipient headers (which happens when forwarding to a remote server a mail checked against SpamAssassin).
In order to fix this issue, the structure of the underlying table was updated. A new table is created upon the first startup following the upgrade, and the old one is ignored.
Impact: the mails enqueued before the update can not be browsed nor removed from the queue after the update.
Recommendation: Conduct this update with an empty mail queue.
To do so:
- Given a distributed Guice James server
- Stop incoming traffic
- Monitor the mailQueues and wait them to be empty (spool & outgoing)
- Once empty, upgrade James server and re-enable incoming traffic.
Date: XX/06/2019
SHA-1: XXXXX
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2794
Concerned products: (experimental) RabbitMQ MailQueue
RabbitMQ mail queue combines RabbitMQ with projections in Cassandra to offer advanced management capabilities expected from a mail queue (browse, delete, size, clear). In these projections, the mails are identified by there name. Thus enqueuing a mail that had already been processed will lead the given email to be considered already deleted and it will be discarded and lost.
This is an issue, as several other components build features around submitting a mail several time with the name.
For instance:
- MailRepository reprocessing
- RemoteDelivery bouncing under some configurations
- RecipientRewriteTable rewriting to a remote server
We thus changed the table structure of RabbitMQ mail queue projections to be built around an EnqueueId. This additional level of indirection allows several enqueues with the same name.
Upgrade to the newest James server needs to be performed with an empty MailQueue.
To do so:
- Given a distributed Guice James server
- Stop incoming traffic
- Monitor the mailQueues and wait them to be empty (spool & outgoing)
- Once empty, upgrade James server and re-enable incoming traffic.
Date: 27/05/2019
SHA-1: bbdf88e56d7a22fe92e1360ef563004f3bc0dd98
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2766
Concerned products: (experimental) Cassandra-guice products.
In version 3.3.0 indexing for the Cassandra product was handled using ElasticSearch 2.2 released on the 31 march 2016. Some major upgrades had been included in recent ElasticSearch version.
Note that ElasticSearch APIs had been undergoing some major changes, making a smooth migration hard to provide. We proposed 2 migration strategies. A simple one leading to major search inconsistencies in the process, and another one mitigating these inconsistencies (but getting rid of them).
ElasticSearch 6 driver is relying on the high-level REST client and no more on the internal transport protocol.
Thus, you need to update your configuration files accordingly:
In elasticsearch.properties
modify the elasticsearch.port
properties to reference the HTTP port of your ElasticSearch
nodes (9200 by default instead of the previous default value of 9300).
Procedure:
- From a running James 3.3.0 cluster connected to a running ElacticSearch 2.2 cluster
- Start an empty ElasticSearch 6.3 cluster
- Shutdown James 3.3.0 cluster and start a James 3.4.0 cluster connected to ElasticSearch 6.3
- Search result will then be empty and thus innacurate
- Thus trigger a Full ReIndexing to restore search consistency.
Keep in mind that full reIndexing needs to process all users email and thus can be slow.
Obviously this approach trades search consistency against ease of migration.
If search consistency during the migration is important for you, consider the next approach
Procedure:
- From a running James 3.3.0 cluster connected to a running ElacticSearch 2.2 cluster
- Start an empty ElasticSearch 6.3 cluster
- Start a James 3.4.0 cluster connected to ElasticSearch 6.3 cluster as well as the Cassandra source of trust database. Traffic should be directed to the James 3.3.0 cluster.
- Trigger an offline Full ReIndexing on the James 3.4.0 cluster
- Once done, direct the traffic to the James 3.4.0 cluster, and dispose the James 3.3.0 cluster as well as the ElasticSearch 2.2 cluster
- Search result will omit changes that took place during the switching process (starting from the reIndexing start)
- Thus trigger a Full ReIndexing to restore search consistency.
Keep in mind that full reIndexing needs to process all users email and thus can be slow.
Changes to apply between 3.2.0 and 3.3.0 had been reported here.
Change list:
- Changes to the MailboxListener API
- Changes in WebAdmin reIndexing API
- Rename KEY column in JAMES_MAILBOX_ANNOTATION table
- Mailet API changes
Date: 30/11/2018
SHA-1: 7e32da51a29bee1c732b2b13708bb4b986140119
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAILBOX-292
MailboxId are now persisted in a james-mailboxId
file. This file is created on the fly, so no action is required for users relying on
the MailDir mailbox.
Date: 30/11/2018
SHA-1: d9bcebc7dd546bd5f11f3d9b496491e7c9042fe2
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAILBOX-354
Only user written components performing MailboxListener registration will be affected.
The MailboxPath is mutable and thus can be changed upon mailbox rename. This leads to significantly complex code with possible inconsistency windows.
Using the mailboxId, which is immutable, solves these issues.
Date: 05/12/2018
SHA-1: 985b9a4a75bfa75c331cba6cbf835c043185dbdb
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2555
We made this API introduced in James 3.2.0 a bit more REST friendly. If you developed tools using this API, you will need to update them.
For more details please refer to the latest WebAdmin documentation.
Date: 19/12/2018
SHA-1: e25967664538be18ec29f47e73e661bdf29da41f
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/MAILBOX/issues/MAILBOX-356
Required: Yes
Concerned products: all JPA related products
Rename KEY
column in JAMES_MAILBOX_ANNOTATION
table. The syntax is:
ALTER TABLE JAMES_MAILBOX_ANNOTATION CHANGE KEY ANNOTATION_KEY varchar(200);
ALTER TABLE JAMES_MAILBOX_ANNOTATION CHANGE COLUMN KEY ANNOTATION_KEY varchar(200);
or the syntax corresponding to your database.
In order to allow safe serialization and strong typing org.apache.mailet.Mail
have changed.
These methods have been deprecated and replaced:
getSender()
in favor ofgetMaybeSender()
getAttribute(String)
in favor ofgetAttribute(AttributeName)
setAttribute(String, Serializable)
in favor ofsetAttribute(Attribute)
removeAttribute(String)
in favor ofremoveAttribute(AttributeName)
getAttributeNames()
in favor ofattributeNames()
andattributesMap()
Some plain-string AttributeName
have also been replaced:
SMTP_AUTH_USER_ATTRIBUTE_NAME
in favor ofSMTP_AUTH_USER
MAILET_ERROR_ATTRIBUTE_NAME
in favor ofMAILET_ERROR
SENT_BY_MAILET
in favor ofSENT_BY_MAILET_ATTRIBUTE
's name, it is recommended to directly set theAttribute
.
Changes to apply between 3.1.0 and 3.2.0 had been reported here.
Changelist:
Date: 31/10/2018
SHA-1: 485406252d82c2d23a4078c76b26d6fc8973bbd7
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2557
Required: Yes
Concerned products: User developed extensions - mailet/matcher
As part of the SMTP protocol, a mail can be sent without sender. This was represented implicitly in James by a potentially null MailAddress
(null
or MailAddress.nullSender()
). This means that mailet/matcher implementers needs to be aware, and handle these cases. This implicit
handling makes nullSender hard to work with, and prooved to be error prone as part of the 3.2.0 development process.
Hence we propose an alternative API returning a MaybeSender
object, requiring the caller to explicitly handle missing sender.
Mail::getSender
had then been deprecated. We strongly encourage our users to rely on Mail::getMaybeSender
.
Note: thanks to java-8 default API methods, this is not a breaking change.
Date: 30/08/2018
SHA-1: 9ba6a1dd270f99735c7f9d3d4b2adb5076583c10
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2529
Required: Yes
Concerned products: Cassandra Guice products
This mailet allow users filtering rules to be applied for incoming emails.
Add this line before the LocalDelivery
mailet of your transport
processor:
<mailet match="RecipientIsLocal" class="org.apache.james.jmap.mailet.filter.JMAPFiltering"/>
Date: 03/08/2018
SHA-1: de0fa8a3df69f50cbc0684dfb1b911ad497856d7
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-2514
Required: Yes
Concerned products: Cassandra Guice products
James Cassandra Guice now officially uses Cassandra 3.11.3 as a storage backend. After performing the upgrade, the team did perform some breaking changes, detailed below. James Cassandra Guice products are no more tested against Cassandra 2.2.x. Thus we strongly advise our users to upgrade.
Replace in default compaction strategies "DateTieredCompactionStrategy" by "TimeWindowCompactionStrategy".
This means you can no more start James on top of an empty Cassandra 2.2.x cluster, but existing deployments should not be impacted.
We will assume that Cassandra had been installed with a debian package. Upgrade procedure stays similar in other cases.
- Update Cassandra dists in
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/cassandra.list
to match 311x repository
deb http://downloads.apache.org/cassandra/debian 311x main
- Update Cassandra
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install cassandra=3.11.3
- Correct the configuration
Edit /etc/cassandra/cassandra.yaml and ensure to really specify the interface cassandra is listening on as seeds.
- ReStart Cassandra
4.1. Drain data & stop
$ nodetool drain
$ nodetool stop
4.2. start Cassandra
- Upgrade SSTable (live update, performance degradation to expect)
$ nodetool upgradesstables apache_james