Java Enterprise Best Practices

Understanding Enterprise Email

When developers gather to talk about enterprise development tools, plain old email doesn’t come up all that often. Email support wasn’t even included in the first editions of the J2EE platform, despite the availability of a relevant Java API. That’s surprising: if you’re reading this book it’s pretty much a given that you use email almost every day. Email is part of the bedrock infrastructure of the Internet, the primary communications conduit for the everyday business of technology (and these days, pretty much everything else). Email traffic between people and computer systems has already hit several hundred billion messages per year, and is expected to double by 2006.

Internet email^[39] has a few very interesting advantages for developers. First, it’s simple. Messages start with a sender and end with a recipient. Sometimes there is more than one recipient, but that’s about as complex as it gets. The mechanics of delivery are largely abstracted away from the user: the average, avid emailer can’t tell you the difference between SMTP, POP, and IMAP, or even Exchange and Lotus Notes, and doesn’t care, either. Unlike Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), relational databases, or even web links, with Internet email no complex conceptualization is required for end users.

Second, email is ubiquitous. Setting up secure, high-performance email servers can be a bit complex, but participating as a client, whether sending or retrieving messages, is a simple task that ...