The inner workings of the mail transport has been divided into two parts, the transport
sender for smtp and the transport listener for pop3. The transport listener will listen to a particular email address periodically. When an email comes in it will be tunneled into an Axis2
engine. On the other hand mail transport sender sends emails to a mail server for a particular email address.
Mail transport can be used against a generic mail server or it can be used
like a mailet. The simple mailet provided with Axis2 will direct any message
that is coming to a particular address into the Axis engine. The engine will
process the message and will use the Transport sender to send the reply.
The mail transports has been written with the use of Sun's JavaMail and Activation jars. These should be available in your classpath to get the mail transport work.
Transport Sender
You need to have a mail account to activate the mail functionality. This
can either be a generic mail server or you can start up a James mail server, which will be available here.
JavaMail sets its properties to a Properties object. In Axis2, this has been mapped to a Parameter object. Mapping has been done as follows,
Every JavaMail property can be set to @name of the <parameter/>. Thus, SSL connection is mapped the way it is done in JavaMail
Few properties, such as password etc are set to @name with the prefix "transport"
For a non-SSL connection, as an example,mail transport sender can be activated by adding following entry to the axis2.xml file.
In runtime tuning a client to set mail transport as easy as follows,
Thus, a user familiar with setting up a SSL connection, he should easily do it with the MailProperties object. For Ex: tuning the sender to talk to gmail account. This configuration should also be done with <parameter/> in Axis2.xml.
Transport Receiver
For a non-SSL connection,as an example,mail Listener can be activated by adding the following entry to the
axis2.xml file.
Note: The @name="transport.mail.replyToAddress" is an important parameter. It supply the Endpoint reference to the listener.
For an advanced user, this can be set to a SSL connection. As an example, lets use this transport listener to pop from a specified gmail account.
Using Mail Transport in the Server Side
If the Mail Listener is need to be started as a standalone mail listener, it can be done
with following command with the all the axis2 jars and the mail dependency
jars in the classpath.
Using Mail Transport in the Client Side
Following code segment shows how to send a one-way (IN-Only MEP) SOAP message using the
mail transport, this needs the Transport Sender configured.
Configure James as SMTP and POP Server
Download the Apache James and start
James, connect to the James via Telnet for administrator James with the
following code
Add users to James
Now James is up and running with the accounts
Using the Included Mail Server
The inbuilt mail server can be started from the command line using the
following piece of code when all the needed jars are in the class path.
The server itself does not need any configuration or tinkering to work. A
ConfigurationContext and the ports to operate on are the only details needed.
The server will store the mails in memory against the recipient till the
recipient pops it from the server. To facilitate the use in *nix environments
as a non root user the pop and smtp ports used by default config/test cases
are (1024 + 25) and (1024 + 110).