Java Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 2
Sending Email
Sending messages is the most basic email need of a Java program. While email clients
like Thunderbird and mailing list managers like listproc are the only common programs
that receive messages, all sorts of programs send messages. For instance, web browsers
can submit HTML forms via email. Security scanning tools can run in the background
and email their results to the administrator when they're done. When the Unix cron
program detects a misconfigured
crontab
file, it emails the error to the owner. Books &
Writers runs a popular service that tracks the sales rank of authors' topics on Ama‐
zon.com and notifies them periodically via email. A massively parallel computation like
like chess can be played across the network by emailing the moves back and forth
(though this scheme wouldn't work for speed chess). And these are just a few of the
different kinds of programs that send email. In today's wired world, by far the simplest
way to notify users of an event when they're not sitting in front of the computer that the
program is running on is to send them an email.
The JavaMail API provides everything programs need to send email. To send a message,
a program follows these steps:
1. Place properties for the session in a
Properties
object.
2. Start a mail session with the
Session.getInstance()
method.
3. Create a new
Message
object, probably by instantiating one of its concrete sub‐
classes.
4. Set the message's From: address.
5. Set the message's To: address.
6. Set the message's Subject:.
7. Set the content of the message.