mbox Store

The mbox Store supports reading messages from files in the UNIX mbox format. The mbox Store is included in the JavaMail source code, but is not currently distributed with JavaMail. To use the mbox Store, you’ll need to build it yourself.

File Locking

The mbox Store supports several file locking choices. To properly interact with other native programs accessing UNIX mailboxes, native file locking code is required. This native file locking code has only been tested on Solaris, and requires a native compiler to build. Native code is used to access the Solaris mailbox locking functions in the libmail library. Unfortunately, the mailbox locking protocol depends on creating hard links, which is not supported before JDK 7.

The mbox Store can also use Java file locking support, which will allow coordination between multiple applications using the mbox Store, but not with native applications accessing the same mailboxes.

Finally, the mbox Store can operate with no locking at all. This is only appropriate if you’re sure that only a single instance of your Java application is accessing the mailbox, and no native applications are accessing the mailbox. You’ll need to coordinate access to the mailbox within your application to ensure that each mailbox is accessed by only a single thread at a time.

The file locking options are selected by setting the mail.mbox.locktype System property:

Mailbox Names

Mailbox names are of the form mbox:name. If name is a relative path name, it is normally relative to the current directory. If the System property mail.mbox.homerelative is set to true, relative names are relative to the current user’s home directory.

The mailbox name can also be of the form mbox:~/name, which is always relative to the current user’s home directory, or mbox:~user/name, which is relative to the given user’s home directory. (The latter only works on Solaris.)

The mailbox name mbox:INBOX is the current user’s Inbox, e.g., in /var/mail on Solaris.

Build Instructions

To build the mbox Store provider, assuming the “c89” compiler is in your PATH and the JDK is in /usr/java:

export MACH=`uname -p`
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java
cd mbox
mvn
cd native
mvn

You can override the default options for the compiler and linker for the native component by specifying Maven properties. The defaults correspond to this:

mvn -Dcompiler.name=c89 \
    -Dcompiler.start.options='-Xa -xO2 -v -D_REENTRANT -I${env.JAVA_HOME}/include -I${env.JAVA_HOME}/include/solaris' \
    -Dlinker.name=c89 \
    -Dlinker.start.options='-G' \
    -Dlinker.end.options='-L${env.JAVA_HOME}/jre/lib/${env.MACH} -lmail -ljava -lc'

XXX - Still need to provide more information.