I have a project with a use case where users should be able to send private messages to other users but this should be integrated with their e-mail box. They should be able to send either private messages or e-mail messages from the same screen.
My thought is to use some kind of open-source e-mail server which will dump the e-mails into MongoDB and then have my Java API pull them out and display them on the interface. And when a user sends an e-mail it is passed by the API to the e-mail server.
Is this a reasonable approach?
If you want your own server (not unreasonable in many cases), check out Apache James - an open-source Java mail server with a plug-in capability. Obviously (!) you can use JavaMail to talk to this, pull messages back etc.
Doesn't Gmail do all of this already? If you want email with chat integration,* that's the first solution that comes to mind. Why reinvent the wheel?
*and about a bajillion other awesome features
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please how to test sending email without real server in java knowing that email is send in a project A and I want to test sending in project B
Email cannot be "sent" without an email server.
Email is modeled after a physical mail system, with a few changes. The "sending" is the equivlent to the dropping the letter off at a post office. It is not possible to do point-to-point email.
Email clients then open their "PO Box" or "Mailbox" on the server, and perhaps (it is optional) then downloads the mail into the local machine.
In fact, the "sending" of an email is a number of back-and-forth communication with the email server using SMTP. Basically sending an email consists of telling the server hello, then asking about it's capabilities, and eventually asking it to validate addresses and accept a body (and optionally attachments).
So, if you really need to send a mail to a product in project B, and you cannot rely on a standalone server, you need to create a server in project B.
I think that you should consider mocking the mail sending. Depending on the frameworks you use, you should be able to find a good way to do it. Here is a blog illustrating a possible mechanism: http://blog.nutpan.com/2012/03/mock-testing-for-java-mail.html?m=1
You can also consider using a mocking framework like easymock or mockito to test it.
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.
Do you know any framework in Java for reliably sending a huge amount of emails with the following features:
Send and receive emails
Concurrently process emails from a queue to maximize the throughput
Keep track of emails that could not be delivered
I know that writing my own is not very hard, but I was wondering whether there is already something sophisticated that I can reuse.
UPDATE: The use case for my question is not sending newsletters or spam. It's emergency mass notification, e.g. sending 50,000 emails within 5 minutes. I also do not want to implement my own mail server, I want to use existing mail server(s) with the JavaMail API. But the JavaMail API doesn't provide any facilities for queing and concurrently sending emails and keeping track of emails that could not be sent.
You use the Java Mail API to construct the actual messages you want to send, and let JavaMail use a production quality mail server to do the actual delivery.
An easy configuration to get up and running is postfix under Ubuntu Server.
Please, please, please do not send out unsolicited spam.
Send and receive emails? Perhaps you are looking for mailing list manager in Java? Take a look at Subetha which is successfully used in several production sites (and written in Java). http://code.google.com/p/subetha/
They have a sub module, called Subethasmtp, which you can use as a smtp server (in Java).
Try the Java Mail API. But for really bulk mailing you probably want to talk directly to SMTP.
You can use "JavaMail" or "GreenMail" for sending and receiving email
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
I want my Java application to send out emails to users. But I cant get a good solution.
Now, I got some on Google but they use a SMTP server which I dont have. I was wondering if setting up one on my Linux machine would be easy?
So, I am using mailx now to send out emails but it sends emails from root which is definately not good. Is there any way to send out emails from a proper email using java? like you can do in php and other languages?
Use commons-email to send email from java in a simple, straightforward way (see the docs).
You need an SMTP server always - even in "php and other languages", but perhaps you don't know you need it, because it is bundled in your LAMP package.
One solution is to use google as an SMTP server. Either via your account, or via google apps. Otherwise setting up an smtp server (postfix for example) linux appears trivial, but isn't - you have to take into consideration many things - see this post by Jeff Atwood.
So ultimately, I'd suggest using the options provided by google.
if you'r looking to host your own mail server, then apache james is a pretty good option.
or other solution could be using a third-party mailservers such as gmail or yahoo; and use the JavaMail API to send emails.
If you don't have an SMTP server, Asprin is a send-only SMTP server, which is a pretty good fit. It suffers from the same problem any do-it-yourself SMTP server will, in that it will look more like a Spam source, so using a proper SMTP server used for e-mail should be done if possible.