| = Distributed James Server — Objectives and motivation |
| :navtitle: Objectives and motivation |
| |
| From the outstanding advantages of a distributed mail system, such as scalability and enhancement, |
| this project aims to implement a backend database version using Postgres. |
| |
| Primary Objectives: |
| |
| * Provide more options: The current James Distributed server uses Cassandra as the backend database. |
| This project aims to provide an alternative to Cassandra, using Postgres as the backend database. |
| This choice aims to offer a highly scalable and reactive James mail server, suitable for small to medium deployments, |
| while the distributed setup remains more fitting for larger ones. |
| * Propose an alternative to the jpa-app variant: The jpa-app variant is a simple version of James that uses JPA |
| to store data and is compatible with various SQL databases. |
| With the postgres-app, we use the `r2dbc` library to connect to the Postgres database, implementing non-blocking, |
| reactive APIs for higher performance. |
| * Leverage advanced Postgres features: Postgres is a powerful database that supports many advanced features. |
| This project aims to leverage these features to improve the efficiency of the James server. |
| For example, the implement https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-rowsecurity.html[row-level security] |
| to improve the security of the James server. |
| * Flexible deployment: The new architecture allows flexible module choices. You can use Postgres directly for |
| blob storage or use Object Storage (e.g Minio, S3...). |
