Chapter 12. Sending and Receiving Email

12. Sending and Receiving Email

Email has been called the killer application of the Internet and is used in many applications. It is very likely that at some point you will want to support email in one of your own Java applications. Fortunately, Java has excellent support for integrating email into your Java applications using the JavaMail API. The JavaMail API is an extension to the core Java. Because of this, you have to download it separately. It is not a part of the standard JDK download. The relevant classes that make up the JavaMail API are in the javax.mail package. The current JavaMail API requires JDK 1.4 or newer. Earlier versions of the JDK require an older version of the JavaMail API.

This chapter covers the topics of sending and receiving email from a Java application. Integrating email capability into your Java application is a great addition to many applications. Some real world examples of where this might be useful included sending email alerts from an application, automatic emailing of logs and reports, and user communication.