Sending and receiving email
from a program is easy with Java. If you are writing an applet, you
can simply trick the browser into composing and sending it for you.
Otherwise, you can use the
JavaMail
Extension (package javax.mail
) to both send and
read mail. JavaMail provides three general categories of classes,
known as
Messages
, Transports
, and
Stores
. A Message
, of course,
represents one email message. A Transport
is a way
of sending a Message
from your application into
the network or Internet. A Store
represents stored
email messages, and can be used to retrieve them as
Message
objects. That is, a
Store
is the inverse of a
Transport
, or, looked at another way, a
Transport
is for sending email and a
Store
is for reading it. One other class,
Session
, is used to obtain references to the
appropriate Store
and/or
Transport
objects that you need to use.
Being an extension, the JavaMail package must be downloaded separately from Sun’s web site and is not part of the core API. It’s worth it, though. For the cost of a few minutes’ downloading time, you get the ability to send and receive electronic mail over a variety of network protocols. JavaMail is also included in the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), so if you have J2EE you do not need to download JavaMail.
Finally, as you might have guessed from Chapter 15, it’s not that big a stretch to write code that contacts an SMTP server yourself and pretends to be a mail program. Hey, why pretend? You really have a mail program at that point!
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