JavaMail API

Chapter 3. Receiving Mail

Receiving mail is considerably more complex than sending it. SMTP uses only 14 different commands, and a simple email client can be implemented with just five of them. POP3, however, has 12 commands, almost all of which a client must be able to handle; IMAP4 has 24 different commands.

The JavaMail API is designed to retrieve messages from an IMAP or perhaps an NNTP server. That is, it assumes the server can return headers separate from the messages they belong to, search through mailboxes, provide the storage for the messages rather than the client, and so forth. The JavaMail API provides less of what you need for client-oriented mail access protocols, such as POP3, that assume the client stores and manages the mail archive; but it still gives you the tools you need to download the mail from the server. You just have to implement your own storage system on the client. (You can check out the experimental POP3RemoteStore if you want to both store and retrieve.)

We’ll begin with the simpler POP3 protocol, then move on to IMAP. From the perspective of JavaMail, IMAP can be viewed largely as POP plus some commands for manipulating folders. For simple programs that operate only on the INBOX folder, POP and IMAP clients are more or less the same.

There are about 12 steps to reading a remote mailbox (the number of steps can vary a little, since some steps are optional or can be combined with or replaced by others):

1. Set up the properties you’ll use for the connection. ...