For many moons I've been running what is basically JBoss Mail Server 1.0-M2 as my personal mail server as well as the mail server of choice for a few friends and collegues. Not only has it run quite nicely, but its held up to the load and been quite stable as well. Now you may think "so what", but my server is a cheesy little Athlon PC box and chances are my friends and I get more mail in a day than most people get in a week between mail lists, spam and more. I get a few thousand a day. Many of which include large attachments.

While this is by no means up to our ultimate goal, its pretty darn good for a milestone release. My prevous mail server was Apache JAMES which tended to choke when I got a lot of email and had some kind of weird leak where I had to restart it all of the time. Moreover, its nice to get the occassional fan mail with my usual collection of medical anatomical enhancement ads. A colleague wrote me and told me how easy it was to install and how well it worked for him immediately.

We're a bit behind on the M3 release but committers have been hard at it. I'm working on getting the unit tests to work in JBoss 4.0.x (there was a feature regression that prevents JBoss microkernel from being started inside of JUnit). The M3 release is going to cut memory consumption and increase performance and scalability pretty dramatically. I'll need to get a more formal benchmarking systme up at that point because we're already able to handle the load of a small enterprise.

One important thing we'll need to get working soon is some form of conventional spam filter, probably just a mailListener or two. Just to save my sanity. I'd prefer a Java solution, but possibly one that can use data from more popular ones. Suggestions would of course be welcome (contributions more welcome).

All in all, things are progressing better than expected. We'll probably trim the feature set of 1.0 and release it sooner rather than wait for stuff like calendaring and preliminary Exchange protocol support (I'd planned 1.0 to happen at the end of the year). So take a look at JBoss Mail Server and stay tuned to the JBMS forum.