| Email was the Internet's first killer app and still generates more Internet traffic than any protocol except HTTP. One of the most frequently asked questions about Java is how to send email from a Java applet or application. While it's certainly possible to write a Java program that uses sockets to communicate with mail servers, this requires detailed knowledge of some fairly complicated protocols, such as SMTP, POP, and IMAP. Just as the URL class makes interacting with HTTP servers a lot simpler than it would be with raw sockets, so too can a class library dedicated to handling email make writing email clients a lot simpler. The JavaMail API is a standard extension to Java that provides a class library for email clients. It's a required component of the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). The JavaMail API can be implemented in 100% Pure Java using sockets and streams, and indeed Sun's reference implementation is so implemented. Programs use the JavaMail API to communicate with SMTP, POP, and IMAP servers to send and receive email. By taking advantage of this API, you can avoid focusing on the low-level protocol details and focus instead on what you want to say with the message. Additional providers can add support for other mail systems such as Hotmail or MH. You can even install providers that add support for NNTP, the protocol used to transport Usenet news. There's no limit to the uses Java programs have for the JavaMail API. Most obviously, you can write standard email clients such as Eudora. Or it can be used for email- intensive applications such as mailing list managers, like listproc. But the JavaMail API is also useful as a part of larger applications that simply need to send or receive a little email. For instance, a server-monitoring application such as Whistle Blower can periodically load pages from a web server running on a different host and email the webmaster if the web server has crashed. An applet can use email to send data to any process or person on the Internet that has an email address, in essence using the web server's SMTP server as a simple proxy to bypass the usual security restrictions about whom an applet is allowed to talk to. In reverse, an applet can talk to an IMAP server on the applet host to receive data from many hosts around the Net. A newsreader could be implemented as a custom service provider that treats NNTP as just one more means of exchanging messages. And that's just the beginning of the sort of programs the JavaMail API makes it very straightforward to write. |
