What is the easiest way for a Java application to receive incoming email?

Question

Sending email is easy with commons-email, and with spring it is even easier. What about receiving incoming email? Are there easy to use APIs that allow to bounce emails, process attachments, etc.

Solution 1

SubEthaSMTP Mail Server allows you to create your own SMTP Server for receiving emails.

Solution 2

James is probably your best bet, but email handling is extremely complex, requiring not only configuration of your MTA (the James server), but also DNS. In the past, I've found it easier to initiate my handlers via hooks from non-Java MTA's like postfix. And procmail might also be useful to you. For a Java MTA though, James rocks.

Solution 3

Apache Commons Net is the perfect library to fetch mails via POP3. IMAP is not supported.

Solution 4

Review the Mail component from apache camel

http://camel.apache.org/mail.html

Solution 5

See if Sun's own JavaMail (API docs) suits your needs.

I'm not sure about easiest, but at least it is a widely used way.

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