Jakarta Commons Cookbook

10.16. Sending Mail with SMTP

Problem

You need to send an email.

Solution

Use SMTPClient from Commons Net. The following example sends a simple email to [e-mail] from [e-mail] via the SMTP server on host www.discursive.com using port 25:

import org.apache.commons.net.smtp.SMTPClient;

SMTPClient client = new SMTPClient( );
client.connect("www.discursive.com");
client.sendSimpleMessage("[e-mail]", 
                         "[e-mail]", 
                         "Hey! Call me when you get a chance." );
client.disconnect( );

This example sends a very simple email message to one recipient by passing three arguments to client.sendSimpleMessage() : the sender’s email address, the recipient’s email address, and a message. If you are trying to send a simple email message to multiple recipients, pass a String[] containing each address as the second parameter to sendSimpleMessage( ). The following example sends a simple email message to multiple recipients by passing a String[] to sendSimpleMessage( ):

import org.apache.commons.net.smtp.SMTPClient;

SMTPClient client = new SMTPClient( );
client.connect("www.discursive.com");

String[] recipients = new String[2];
recipients[0] = "[e-mail]";
recipients[1] = "[e-mail]";

client.sendSimpleMessage("[e-mail]", 
                         recipients, 
                         "The eagle has landed." );
client.disconnect( );

Discussion

Telnet to port 25 of a SMTP server, and you will see the server respond with a numeric code (220). SMTPReply.isPositiveCompletion( ) returns true ...