The mail component provides access to Email via Spring's Mail support and the underlying JavaMail system.

Geronimo mail .jar

We have discovered that the geronimo mail .jar (v1.6) has a bug when polling mails with attachments. It cannot correctly identify the Content-Type. So, if you attach a .jpeg file to a mail and you poll it, the Content-Type is resolved as text/plain and not as image/jpeg. For that reason, we have added an org.apache.camel.component.ContentTypeResolver SPI interface which enables you to provide your own implementation and fix this bug by returning the correct Mime type based on the file name. So if the file name ends with jpeg/jpg, you can return image/jpeg. You can set your custom resolver on the MailComponent instance or on the MailEndpoint instance. This feature is added in Camel 1.6.2/2.0.

Geronimo mail .jar

We have discovered that the geronimo mail .jar (v1.6) has a bug when polling mails with attachments. It cannot correctly identify the Content-Type. So, if you attach a .jpeg file to a mail and you poll it, the Content-Type is resolved as text/plain and not as image/jpeg. For that reason, we have added an org.apache.camel.component.ContentTypeResolver SPI interface which enables you to provide your own implementation and fix this bug by returning the correct Mime type based on the file name. So if the file name ends with jpeg/jpg, you can return image/jpeg. You can set your custom resolver on the MailComponent instance or on the MailEndpoint instance. This feature is added in Fuse Mediation Router 1.6.2/2.0.

	POP3 or IMAP
	POP3 has some limitations and end users are encouraged to use IMAP if possible.

	Using mock-mail for testing
	You can use a mock framework for unit testing, which allows you to test without the need for a real mail server. However you should remember to not include the mock-mail when you go into production or other environments where you need to send mails to a real mail server. Just the presence of the mock-javamail.jar on the classpath means that it will kick in and avoid sending the mails.

Mail endpoints can have one of the following URI formats (for the protocols, SMTP, POP3, or IMAP, respectively):

smtp://[username@]host[:port][?options]
pop3://[username@]host[:port][?options]
imap://[username@]host[:port][?options]

The mail component also supports secure variants of these protocols (layered over SSL). You can enable the secure protocols by adding s to the scheme:

smtps://[username@]host[:port][?options]
pop3s://[username@]host[:port][?options]
imaps://[username@]host[:port][?options]

You can append query options to the URI in the following format, ?option=value&option=value&...

Typically, you specify a URI with login credentials as follows (taking SMTP as an example):

smtp://[username@]host[:port][?password=somepwd]

Alternatively, it is possible to specify both the user name and the password as query options:

smtp://host[:port]?password=somepwd&username=someuser

For example:

smtp://mycompany.mailserver:30?password=tiger&username=scott

As of Fuse Mediation Router 1.4, default port numbers are supported. If the port number is omitted, Fuse Mediation Router determines the port number to use based on the protocol.

The underlying mail framework is responsible for providing SSL support. Fuse Mediation Router uses SUN JavaMail, which only trusts certificates issued by well known Certificate Authorities. So if you issue your own certificate, you have to import it into the local Java keystore file (see SSLNOTES.txt in JavaMail for details).

As of Fuse Mediation Router 1.4 the default consumer delay is now 60 seconds. Fuse Mediation Router will therefore only poll the mailbox once a minute to avoid overloading the mail server. The default value in Fuse Mediation Router 1.3 is 500 milliseconds.

In Fuse Mediation Router 1.5 the following default options have changed:

Fuse Mediation Router uses the message exchange's IN body as the MimeMessage text content. The body is converted to String.class.

Fuse Mediation Router copies all of the exchange's IN headers to the MimeMessage headers.

The subject of the MimeMessage can be configured using a header property on the IN message. The code below demonstrates this:

from("direct:a").setHeader("subject", constant(subject)).to("smtp://james2@localhost");

The same applies for other MimeMessage headers such as recipients, so you can use a header property as To:

Map map = new HashMap();
map.put("To", "[email protected]");
map.put("From", "[email protected]");
map.put("Subject", "Camel rocks");

String body = "Hello Claus.\nYes it does.\n\nRegards James.";
template.sendBodyAndHeaders("smtp://[email protected]", body, map);

From Fuse Mediation Router 1.5 onwards, the recipients specified in the message headers always take precedence over recipients pre-configured in the endpoint URI. The idea is that if you provide any recipients in the message headers, that is what you get. The recipients pre-configured in the endpoint URI are treated as a fallback.

In the sample code below, the email message is sent to [email protected], because it takes precedence over the pre-configured recipient, [email protected]. Any CC and BCC settings in the endpoint URI are also ignored and those recipients will not receive any mail. The choice between headers and pre-configured settings is all or nothing: the mail component either takes the recipients exclusively from the headers or exclusively from the pre-configured settings. It is not possible to mix and match headers and pre-configured settings.

        Map<String, Object> headers = new HashMap<String, Object>();
        headers.put("to", "[email protected]");

        template.sendBodyAndHeaders("smtp://admin@[email protected]", "Hello World", headers);

As of Fuse Mediation Router 1.5, it is possible to set multiple recipients using a comma-separated or a semicolon-separated list. This applies both to header settings and to settings in an endpoint URI. For example:

        Map<String, Object> headers = new HashMap<String, Object>();
        headers.put("to", "[email protected] ; [email protected] ; [email protected]");

The preceding example uses a semicolon, ;, as the separator character.

You can specify recipients in the format, name <email>, to include both the name and the email address of the recipient.

For example, you define the following headers on the a Message:

Map headers = new HashMap();
map.put("To", "Claus Ibsen <[email protected]>");
map.put("From", "James Strachan <[email protected]>");
map.put("Subject", "Camel is cool");

SUN JavaMail is used under the hood for consuming and producing mails. We encourage end-users to consult these references when using either POP3 or IMAP protocol. Note particularly that POP3 has a much more limited set of features than IMAP.

We start with a simple route that sends the messages received from a JMS queue as emails. The email account is the admin account on mymailserver.com.

from("jms://queue:subscription").to("smtp://[email protected]?password=secret");

In the next sample, we poll a mailbox for new emails once every minute. Notice that we use the special consumer option for setting the poll interval, consumer.delay, as 60000 milliseconds = 60 seconds.

from("imap://[email protected]?password=secret&unseen=true&consumer.delay=60000").to("seda://mails");

In this sample we want to send a mail to multiple recipients. This feature was introduced in camel 1.4:

// all the recipients of this mail are:
// To: [email protected] , [email protected]
// CC: [email protected]
// BCC: [email protected]
String recipients = "&[email protected],[email protected]&[email protected]&[email protected]";

from("direct:a").to("smtp://[email protected]?password=secret&[email protected]" + recipients);

	Attachments are not support by all Fuse Mediation Router components
	The Attachments API is based on the Java Activation Framework and is generally only used by the Mail API. Since many of the other Fuse Mediation Router components do not support attachments, the attachments could potentially be lost as they propagate along the route. The rule of thumb, therefore, is to add attachments just before sending a message to the mail endpoint.

The mail component supports attachments, which is a feature that was introduced in Fuse Mediation Router 1.4. In the sample below, we send a mail message containing a plain text message with a logo file attachment.

// create an exchange with a normal body and attachment to be produced as email
Endpoint endpoint = context.getEndpoint("smtp://[email protected]?password=secret");

// create the exchange with the mail message that is multipart with a file and a Hello World text/plain message.
Exchange exchange = endpoint.createExchange();
Message in = exchange.getIn();
in.setBody("Hello World");
in.addAttachment("logo.jpeg", new DataHandler(new FileDataSource("src/test/data/logo.jpeg")));

// create a producer that can produce the exchange (= send the mail)
Producer producer = endpoint.createProducer();
// start the producer
producer.start();
// and let it go (processes the exchange by sending the email)
producer.process(exchange);

In this sample, we want to poll our Google mail inbox for mails. To download mail onto a local mail client, Google mail requires you to enable and configure SSL. This is done by logging into your Google mail account and changing your settings to allow IMAP access. Google have extensive documentation on how to do this.

from("imaps://[email protected]&password=YOUR_PASSWORD"
    + "&delete=false&unseen=true&consumer.delay=60000").to("log:newmail");

The preceding route polls the Google mail inbox for new mails once every minute and logs the received messages to the newmail logger category. Running the sample with DEBUG logging enabled, we can monitor the progress in the logs:

2008-05-08 06:32:09,640 DEBUG MailConsumer - Connecting to MailStore imaps//imap.gmail.com:993 (SSL enabled), folder=INBOX
2008-05-08 06:32:11,203 DEBUG MailConsumer - Polling mailfolder: imaps//imap.gmail.com:993 (SSL enabled), folder=INBOX 
2008-05-08 06:32:11,640 DEBUG MailConsumer - Fetching 1 messages. Total 1 messages. 
2008-05-08 06:32:12,171 DEBUG MailConsumer - Processing message: messageNumber=[332], from=[James Bond <[email protected]>], [email protected]], subject=[... 
2008-05-08 06:32:12,187 INFO  newmail - Exchange[MailMessage: messageNumber=[332], from=[James Bond <[email protected]>], [email protected]], subject=[...

In this sample we poll a mailbox and store all attachments from the mails as files. First, we define a route to poll the mailbox. As this sample is based on google mail, it uses the same route as shown in the SSL sample:

from("imaps://[email protected]&password=YOUR_PASSWORD"
    + "&delete=false&unseen=true&consumer.delay=60000").process(new MyMailProcessor());

Instead of logging the mail we use a processor where we can process the mail from java code:

    public void process(Exchange exchange) throws Exception {
        // the API is a bit clunky so we need to loop
        Map<String, DataHandler> attachments = exchange.getIn().getAttachments();
        if (attacments.size() > 0) {
            for (String name : attachments.keySet()) {
                DataHandler dh = attachments.get(name);
                // get the file name
                String filename = dh.getName();

                // get the content and convert it to byte[]
                 byte[] data = exchange.getContext().getTypeConverter().convertTo(byte[].class, dh.getInputStream());

                // write the data to a file
                FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(filename);
                out.write(data);
                out.flush();
                out.close();
            }
        }
   }

As you can see the API to handle attachments is a bit clunky but it's there so you can get the javax.activation.DataHandler so you can handle the attachments using standard API.