javaparsingemailemail-parsing

Java Email message Parser?


Is anyone familiar with a Java library that helps with parsing the fields (date, subject, from, to) of the email below?

Message-ID: <19815303.1075861029555.JavaMail.ss@kk>
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2010 12:32:20 -0800 (PST)
From: someone@someotherplace.com
To: someone@someplace.com
Subject: some subject
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-From: one, some <some.one@someotherplace.com>
X-To: one
X-cc: 
X-bcc: 
X-Folder: Bob\Inbox
X-Origin: Bob-R
X-FileName: rbob (Non-Privileged).pst


some message

Solution

  • JavaMail is an oracle library that provides mail services and mail related services (like parsing conventional & MIME messages) in the javax.mail package. Additionally Apache has a Commons Email library for mail handling.

    In the JavaMail api, a simple way to parse a string containing an email message (which may or may not be explicitly MIME) would be as follows

    String content = ...
    Session s = Session.getInstance(new Properties());
    InputStream is = new ByteArrayInputStream(content.getBytes());
    MimeMessage message = new MimeMessage(s, is);
    

    and parsing the headers could be done like this

    message.getAllHeaderLines();
    for (Enumeration<Header> e = message.getAllHeaders(); e.hasMoreElements();) {
        Header h = e.nextElement();
        h.getName();
        h.getValue();
    }