Develop Reference

Send/Receive Email from within Web Application?

I have an Order Management (Web) Application (in Java/Java EE).
The application users want to Send Receive email communication to Customers who placed the Order, from within the Web-Application. The Email Trail must be associated with the Order.
The use-case is:
User opens the Order Detail Page. Order info. is displayed.
On that page - Clicks on Email Icon, and it will show up all Email Communication (sent/received) for that Order till date.
For that Order - You can see new incoming mails, reply to mails or send out new mails to the Customer - all related to that Order.
Questions:
Sending out emails is easy, but how to receive emails within the app?
What is the email account here - A common Email Account called orders#myorg.com (and based on subject line/some-header emails are filtered etc.) or is it orderid#myorg.com (in which case new email acct creation is reqd per order) or ?
We already have Microsoft Exchange Server via which company email travels. Could we leverage that in someway or do we need to setup a new Mail Server?
Any ideas are welcome.

If you're willing to take on the dependency, Spring Integration can comfortably read email from a designated server on a polling (POP3, IMAP) or event-driven basis (IMAP-IDLE). [1 & 3]
[2] You can use a dedicate mail account and filter the mail sent to downstream channels based on the subject (or other field) of the incoming mail. The following snippet from the Spring site illustrates this:
<int-mail:imap-idle-channel-adapter id="customAdapter"
store-uri="imaps://some_google_address:${password}#imap.gmail.com/INBOX"
channel="receiveChannel"
should-mark-messages-as-read="true"
java-mail-properties="javaMailProperties"
mail-filter-expression="subject matches '(?i).*Spring Integration.*'"/>
Where mail-filter-expression filters the email that will be flushed down receiveChannel. For all interested parties (channels), you'll have one <int-mail:imap-idle-channel-adapter/> listening to your Exchange server.
While it's not cumbersome to use, I'd recommend you look at a short overview of EAI according to spring and of EAI in general

You need the following.
Java Mail API to programmatically send emails through some exchange server.
I would suggest to use a dedicated email server to receive application specific emails. You can do this by using James. You can send and receive emails through this software.
If you use your existing Microsoft Exchange Server, you can always use redirect to your application specific email server.

Receive emails
Here is example code to read an email Are there any good short code examples that simply read a new gmail message?
Email account here
For each user create an email account and have user's web app credentials used as credentials for email as well.
Use hashed order id as part of subject to relate each email chain to specific order.
Microsoft Exchange Server
Use either exJello is a JavaMail provider (http://www.exjello.org/)
OR Use JavaMail API with DavMail Gateway (http://davmail.sourceforge.net/)

From a user point of view I think keeping a specific subject is more difficult. I would suggest a sub domain like myapp.myorg.com or a new domain like myapp.com
Either ways have a catch all so that all mails go to a specific email like orders#myapp.myorg.com
Then your script can check the real TO. This might be more natural and 'cool' -> each order has its own mail id! On top of that use James or other mail software to get delivery to your code.

How to send an email to a java program

I'd like to write a program, probably a servlet or something to run on the a google app engine that I can send an email to. So not a program to send email, but one that can receieve it and parse it.
My question is, what code or API are out there that can receive an email?

Basically on your google app engine you can use an inbound mail service.
Please see this documentation for more information.
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/mail/overview.html#Receiving_Mail_in_Java

You cant send an email to a program, you send an email to a server, so what you are looking for is a way to access an email server via your program. Unfortunately there is no single solution here, you need to configure your program for every different email account/server you want to access. (If you have ever set up an account in outlook or something like it you will get the idea)
For example here is a link to the gmail api, you could use this to access gmail accounts
http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/

You need to have a mailbox to send message there and you could read messages with the code like this: http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/Network-Protocol/GetEmailMessageExample.htm

This can be done with a built in Java library.
javax.mail
Check out this link. It should be able to help you get started.
This won't work for every mail server, but depending on your setup it might help.

To send an email to a Java program, that program must be running. Generally that means a server style (aka service) receiver is favored.
For the email to be received, the Java service must understand an email protocol. There are a number of protocols, but SMTP is the standard for receiving email. Once you have a service that understands SMTP protocol for receiving email, you have written a mail server.
Note that most people don't care to write a mail server, as a mail client needs to connect to the server and pull the email to make it readable. Keep this in mind when designing the solution to your problem.

Sending email programmatically on a Mac using Java (through Mac Mail Client)

I've done quite a bit of research on this matter and I can't seem to come up with a solid solution to my problem.
I am developing a Java client application that (should) allow users to import their contacts from Mac Address Book by fetching them in a list format and allowing the user to select a subset/all and click a button that would send an "invitation" to these users.
I was able to grab contacts using the Rococoa Java framework but I am uncertain as to how to send email or if it is even possible. I realize there are security concerns with this, but I was able to accomplish this same task on Outlook for PC.
It seems that I may have to call an Applescript from my Java that manually opens Mac Mail Client and sends email using their default mail account setup.
I could be totally off-base here... should I even bother sending mail through the user's default Mail account? I wanted to avoid using a different mail server to avoid spam etc.
Any help would be appreciated, thank you for your time.
Matt

Here's an applescript to use Mail...
set emailSender to "sender#email.com>"
set emailTo to "recipient#email.com"
set theSubject to "The subject of the mail"
set theContent to "message body"
tell application "Mail"
set newMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {sender:emailSender, subject:theSubject, content:theContent, visible:true}
tell newMessage
make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {address:emailTo}
send
end tell
end tell
Another option, if you know the smtp information, is to use python. I made a command line program you can use. Find it here. There's example code to use it on the web page.

What is needed to add emailing capabilities to web application?

I have java web application to which I'd like to add emailing capabilities, however, I'm unsure what is needed to accomplish this. Specifically I want my app to be able to:
Send emails confirming sign-up
Allow users to send emails to one another, using my app's domain i.e. dan#my-app.com
From my research it seems I'll need a mail transfer agent (MTA) like Postfix and possibly a IMAP server like Courier; but I don't understand the need for the IMAP server.
Thanks.

You need code inside your web app to create and dispatch the email into the SMTP-world. Usually JavaMail is used for this, and you can either enclose it in your web application or (preferred) have the web container provide a correctly configured instance through JNDI. This is vendor specific.
If you do not have a SMTP-server for JavaMail to connect to (frequently this is Exchange for Windows shops), you can either get one running (ask your IT administrator) or use Google Mail or Hotmail or others if it is ok for your web application to send mail through them. It is a bit tricky to use GMail as a SMTP-server, but when set up correctly works very well.
You will need the SMTP-server, as it handles all the boring details regarding MX records and resending if the SMTP-server does graylisting, etc. etc.
Oh, and IMAP is for getting delivered mail, not sending mail. You don't need it.

If it's a Java web app, then the server part is a servlet. Given an email message sent from a client form, your server needs to send that text off as an email.
There's code in the Java EE stack to do this, or you can specifically download JavaMail. This will allow your programs to act as mail clients.
Your MTA receives messages from your servlet and sends them to the users. So far so good.
But you also need a postbox, i.e. the equivalent of a mail in-box for your users. Postfix, QMail and others offer a basic "flat" mailbox model, where mail is simply stored until the client picks it up, and then (usually) deleted. Access is via POP3. IMAP offers a lot more organizational capability, i.e. the ability to specify hierarchies of nested mailboxes, to transfer mails between them and so on. You probably won't want to create a GUI front end to all that complexity, so I'd guess you don't really need an IMAP server. You do, however, want a relatively simple POP3 server to allow your servlet to access the mailboxes via TCP/IP. This is usually part of the "standard" email server packages.
To have your own domain known to the world, you need access to the MX records of your DNS service, i.e. you have to set up one or two of your hosts, on an Internet-facing address, to be your post office.
Finally, if you want to save yourself a lot of trouble, be very careful in configuring your MTA (SMTP server) such that there is no chance for it being used as an open relay. i.e. it should not be possible for your users to send mail to the outside world in general (or hackers will find a way to abuse your Web interface to do this), and mail from the Internet should not reach your users. Most importantly, there should be no way for mail from the Internet to be forwarded to someplace else in the Internet. Find an open relay testing service (they're free) on the 'net and get one to run a test on your configuration once you think you're done.
EDIT:
Looking at Thorbjorn's answer, I realized you probably don't want your users receiving their mail through your app; they probably already have email providers and accounts of their own. In that case, you don't need to worry about inbox capability or a POP3 server. You could consider offering full email services at your domain but that's a very thankless job and if you have any choice, leave that dirty work to GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail and their ilk. Whatever service you provide will never please your customers enough, and you'll be fighting spam and other crime every day.

For starters your server has to have mailing abilities. In linux land sendmail is usually what this will be.
Additionally, check out javaMail.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index-jsp-139225.html

Disable Outlook Email Forwarding in Java

In Outlook there are options to disabled replying to and forwarding of emails. Granted this is only a rudimentary level of security as someone can always copy / paste the email content, but it does prevent accidental forwarding of confidential emails.
My question is how can these options be disabled when sending a mail using Java? I am using Spring's JavaMailSenderImpl but could move to a different library if required.
Thanks in advance.

Taking a look about and it appears that this is a feature of Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services so would likely require talking to that rather than just setting a header. But to test that send yourself a mail to say a GMail account and then use the "view original" option.

I found this on Scott Hanselman's blog, suggesting that this information isn't written into the email header as I had hoped, which suggests to me that disabling forwarding would be very difficult in pure Java without some interaction through JNI:
It only flips a metadata bit in the message and that metadata is only transmitted within Exchange (within your company). It is not propagated to outside email addresses.