In 2021 open source company Linagora upgraded the government system providing email for every citizen of Estonia to use Apache James.

These allow users to write their own mail-handling code, such as to update a database, build a message archive, or filter spam.

The Apache James project also produces pure Java libraries for implementing Sender Policy Framework (SPF), the Sieve mail filtering language, and parsing MIME content streams, independent of Sun's JavaMail API.

[4] In January 2003, James was upgraded to a top-level Apache project in a unanimous decision by the ASF Board of Directors, under the chairmanship of Serge Knystautas.

James was initially distributed within the Phoenix container, which implemented the Apache Avalon application framework.