On a desktop machine if you browse to the address given you by the administrator, you'll get the login screen where you can authenticate with your imap username and password to access your email.



If you tick the Remember box a cookie is written to your browser. Depending on the browser's configuration, the Username field may be pre-filled next time you access the app. The link on the top left is there in case you arrived here using a small screen device; it will take you to the mobile interface, although hopefully that should have happened automatically. Jwma makes the assumption that you will mainly use a computer to manage your email with the mobile interface there to access the main features whilst you are away from home or office.

This is where you land after a successful login and where you can quickly return to from the left most link onthe navigation bar. What you see, to some extent depends on the underlying system used for email storage. First, here's jwma running on a mbox system:-



From top working down, you see that the INBOX has 3 messages, one of which has not been read. The already mentioned navigation bar takes you to the other parts of the app as well as returning you here. Below that, on the black bar next to the small folder image there is a forward slash (/) character. This is the path separator for the particular system that these messages are stored on. It's helpful to know this if you want to create nested mailboxes ie mailboxes hidden from the main view.

Next the pre-exisiting folders and mailboxes are displayed. Folders, which can contain mailboxes are shown on the left and mailboxes which contain individual messages on the right. Although they can't be seen, it's likely that the archive folder contains some nested mailboxes. These would be revealed by clicking the folder name and the layout would remain similar to the one shown, but just listing mailboxes inside the folder rather than those logically directly inside the INBOX. If instead of clicking a folder, you click a mailbox, which includes the INBOX you are taken to a Message list for the particular mailbox.

Below here are options to delete selected folders or mailboxes, move mailboxes from their logical position inside the INBOX to another folder and create new folders or mailboxes. Finally the icon at bottom right shows that the Trash folder is not empty. In this state the icon is a link that takes you to a list of deleted messages.

If instead of an mbox storage system the administrator has set up a maildir system, what you see will look more like this:-



There is no Folder as opposed to Mailbox distinction as all folders can contain both messages and other folders nested within them. In both systems, jwma limits nesting to 2 levels, ie messages are logically stored directly in the INBOX or either one or two levels beneath it. Note that on this maildir system the folder separator is a period/dot/fullstop (.) and that when the screen shot was taken although the INBOX and Trash were empty, the sent folder contains a single message.

Clicking the nested Folders link reveals the whole mail storage layout, not just the Mailboxes nested within a single folder as in the mbox system.



Finally, since this type of system does not distinguish mailboxes from folders, the Create new button does not need to offer that choice. It is only in this first main window that there is any difference apparant to the jwma user between the two email storage systems it presents.

You'll want to replace the Mail identity with one or more of your own email addresses. Note that you cannot delete the default until at least one alternative is in place. This is because it's not possible to send email without this setting.

If you select a different language all the screens (except the login page) will be translated accordingly. Note that by default Trash messages are automatically deleted when you logout; if you stick with this, although deleting messages from other mailboxes actually moves them to Trash, on logging out, they really will be gone.

By default, sent mail is not archived to an Outbox and there is no Draft folder for saving messages (even if there is a mailbox of that name); you'll probably want to select mailboxes for these roles, possibly creating them first back in the app's Main page.

Message display options:-

• 1. geek - plain text only display including the structure of the message
• 2. plain text - the default, a standard plain text display
• 3. block images - html messages displayed, but images blocked
• 4. in line images only - as above, but with in line images displayed
• 5. allow all images - remote images fetched and included in the display.

There are changes here compared to earlier versions of jwma for html display; none of the settings 3 to 5 now leave a stylesheet in place. Any javascript is also removed and I actually don't recommend setting 5, which does still allow remote images to be fetched (more on this later). My preference is for the use of setting 1 or 2 as you can quickly switch from a plain text view to settings 3 and 4 for individual messages. In settings 3 and 4, any remote images that have been blocked are listed as clickable links at the bottom of the display. The descriptors for these links are the actual filenames that have been blocked.

You must press the Update button to make changes stick. Don't forget to do this after changing mail identities.

IMPORTANT! - any problem with deleting messages failing silently (no warning in red text) is probably due to this issue. The same applies to an attempt to create a mailbox or folder failing without warning.

Here's an mailbox with 3 messages; looking directly below the navigation bar you see this is the INBOX, but listings of all the mail boxes will have similar appearance.

You can Select all messages for a mass Delete or Move to; that can also be done on an individual basis by checking boxes on the left as appropriate. Delete is actually a move to Trash except for messages already there, when it really is a delete. Looking at the three individual messages, you see that the first has not been read N, the other two have been read and the third has been answered as well AR. This third message also has an attachment, which is indicated with *.

The sorted by setting shown is not the default (rather Date oldest first), when this is changed the selection sticks automatically for all mailboxes and is remembered even if you logout.

Search allows you to create a list of messages from the current mailbox which contains your search term in the body of the message. Clicking on the subject of a message displays it for reading and to the right, delivery date and message size are displayed.

The appearance of messages depends on the display style chosen in Settings.

This mail (not shown full length) is in the INBOX folder, that being a link which would take you back to its message list. As it's #1 in the folder, it's the oldest, as chosen sort order has no bearing on this. To the right there are widgets for cycling through the messages in a folder and for presenting the message in a screen suitable for printing . Also a head and shoulders icon which will reveal and conceal the email headers. The current message display setting is option 1. geek so there is information about the structure of the message as well as its content.

With that same setting made, here's a different message that has remote images:-

This message has rather more innocent looking remote images, shown here with setting 5. allow all images:-

As standard Jwma creates and sends messages as plain text

The rich text link replaces the text area with an embedded html editor to allow the creation of html messages.

If you use the Browse button to add a file attachment, two further file selectors will appear automatically, giving the option to attach up to three files. If an attachment is an image file many email clients (including jwma if Setting 4 or 5 are used for reading messages) will display the image as well as creating a download link for it. Although an attached image file is treated as an inline image, it's not possible at the moment to place it in a particular position; there's further explanation (and work!) in the developer section

Save Draft allows you to save a partially complete message into the folder you configured as described in the User configuration section. If you have not done this a warning is displayed. It is not functional if rich text was selected or if a file has been attached to the message. A work around is to write and save a plain text message; when you reopen it from the draft folder you can switch to rich text and apply the markup as you want.

No attempt is made to display forwarded messages before they are sent on; you see that the subject and recipient have been rewritten and a preamble stating that this is a forwarded message. You can edit this preamble before sending, but if you are forwarding a message with an html part, there's no guarantee the recipient will see this. Reason being that any preamble goes into a plain text part which may not be displayed.

This allows you to store a list of contacts with email addresses. Clicking on the email address takes you to the compose window, with the To field pre-entered. Selecting a checkbox and pressing the Email contacts button has similar effect, but this has the additional function of placing a list of recipients in the To field if more than a single checkbox is selected.

The list can be filtered by surname using the selector, which will initially be labeled * to indicate that the full list of contacts is displayed.

Delete contacts operates on entries whose checkbox has been selected. Create contact does its work when the firstname, lastname and email fields have been completed.

To create a new top level mailbox type a name such as test in the input field adjacent to the drop down list and press the Create new button. As explained in the Main page section above, some of the following is underlying system specific.

On both mbox and maildir systems you can use the mailbox store separator character, shown on the black bar of the Main page to create a nested mailbox or folder. On a mbox based system test/test in the input field, will create both a new folder and a new mailbox within it, or just a new nested mailbox if the folder already exists. You can create an empty folder without creating a mailbox at the same time by selecting Folder from the drop down list. On a maildir system test.test will only work if there is already a folder test.

On both systems that already have test/test | test.test, after pressing Create new with test/another | test.another in the input field, the single test folder will now contain two mailboxes or folders. You must always use the correct file separator of the underlying system or the result will not be what you expect.

Folders and mailboxes are deleted by checking the appropriate box and pressing the Delete button. Care is needed as without warning all mailboxes | folders nested within a folder are removed As described here, all messages within all deleted folders | mailboxes will be moved to Trash.

Mailboxes and maildir folders with all the messages they contain can be moved around the hierarchy by checking the appropriate box, selecting the folder from the drop down list and pressing the Move to button.

If you access Jwma using your smart phone, you should be automatically directed to an alternative interface, but as a fall back the login screen of each interface allows you to switch manually. Compared to the desktop interface there are optimizations both in layout and in a reduction of the feature set.

These screenshots where taken from a galaxy 2 running cyanogenmod; the mobile interface looks pretty much the same on the iphone.

A successful login takes you directly to the INBOX rather than a folder listing. The mailbox list is accessible in the same way as on the desktop interface (the first left navigation icon) a major difference being that folders and any mailboxes nested within them (mbox system) and nested folders (maildir) are not accessible. Other differences include the absence of a save draft option, no option to create html mail, message lists are displayed in recent first order and message display being set to plain text (option 2).

There is no contradiction between the two interfaces in that their settings do not clash. Any folders, nested mailboxes (mbox) and nested folders (maildir) you created via desktop access remain untouched by small screen access and if you normally read messages using some setting other than plain text, that setting will remain in place for desktop access.

If you'd like to contribute in any way please get in touch; especially if you want to do something major that you would like included in future releases. All patches that add or improve functionality or squash bugs will be considered and you'll be credited for your work. I'll help you get started, in particular with getting up to speed with the stripes framework.

Jwma was rewritten (start v2.0) using this framework which is also discussed here . You'll need a java development environment, a java webapp server and imap server. The imap server needs to be configured with a username and password and needs to accept authentication from a webmail front end in plain text. A running mail exchanger is not necessary for most development work.

It's very easy to build jwma from the source code with java 11, you can use ant, the linux shell or windows powershell (though this has not been tested). Simply move the appropriate script/build file out of the build_scripts directory and run it (or ant) from the base directory. Although the build.xml (ant) and build.sh (linux) produce slightly different binaries they are functionally identical.

The ongoing development of jwma has given the lie to the old write once run anywhere java mantra. There was activation.jar flitting in and then out of standard java, which meant at one time you did not need to add that as a seperate library. Now we hava jakarta-activation so it looks like jwma will need to supply that for the foreseeable future. There is also the curious case 0f imaps crypto; you can check this out in the JwmaAuthenticator.java code around line 31. At one time we could use baked in crypto, now we must include the sunjce_provider library. I can't remeber the versions, but there was a situation where we could compile and run on one version of java, also run on a later java, but not compile on that version without the new crypto library.

So if you want to run jwma on a different webapp container or latter java version, be warned there may be some work to do. If you have a success story, please let me know. To get jwma to compile under java 17, the first thing is to replace all imports from the javax package with corresponding jakarta equivalents. The source code supplies servlet-api.jar taken from the tomcat 8 release. This library is required for compilation, but is not needed in the binary war file at runtime. If you're working with java 17 and tomcat 10 replace it with the jar from that version of tomcat. Other coding changes will be necessary, please let me know if you pull this off!

To add another language, copy a StripesResources properties file in /webmail/web/WEB-INF/classes to StripesResources_xx.properties (where xx is something suitably representative), translating the right hand side of = on each line of the file. Add the appropriate xx to the languages list in jwma.config and rebuild as above. The war file will appear in the base directory. Follow a similar procedure to improve the supplied files (mis)translated from English. Please submit a copy of your file for inclusion a future release.

It's been brought to my attention recently that jwma does not support Content-Id; it still does not, although it does now accept the cid: attribute as valid. It (and images in email generally) is not an area that greatly interests me; the java-cid project looks relevant, at least for displaying email. As I now (think I) understand, cid: is used to place an uploaded image at a particular point in the document, rather than have it tacked on at the end.

That nicely leads to the topic of writing html email, which greatly disinterests me :-). This was previously offered by embedding the wyzz editor; I've replaced it in this version with nicEdit. There are dozens of these javascript based embeddible editors out there and I tried a good few of them. Most of them readily produce code that gmail (my gold standard!) does not consider to be html - even a 'specially for webmail' version of tinymce is guilty of that.

In the editors directory there are everything you need to quickly replace nicEdit with either wyzz or tinymce should you want to try that; in general though it's not difficult to swap out nicEdit for a number of other alternatives, whether it's worth doing is another matter. A possible way forward is for a javascript/jquery expert to pick on one and hack it into shape where it aggressively produces code that gmail, hotmail, mega_provider X (and jwma!) agree to markup as html and also handles Content Id. This need not of course be tied into jwma, but could be a stand alone effort. Another possibility is to do it all in java rather than javascript and make further use of the excellent jericho-html library.

Gmail takes a different approach to multipart email than does jwma; it displays everything, a plain text part and also any html part, either marked up as such if it approves of the code or just the tags and content as further quasi plain text and that looks like a real dog's dinner. You may think you've crafted a fine html message that will display very nicely for all your customers with gmail addresses. What you may not realize is that behind the scenes jwma does "the right thing" and adds a plain text rendering of your content and gmail will display that above the html version. You should be able to stop that behaviour if you must with a bit of source code hacking. The file to alter is SendMessage.java; comment out lines 224 to 226 and also 230 and you may as well also remove line 4.

Is it possible to replace the intricate html tables in the JSP files with grid-template and css retaining the appearance as is? I've twice set about this task, with some determination the second time, but comprehensively failed.