1. Overview
In this quick tutorial, we’re going to look at sending an email with and without attachments using the core Java mail library.
2. Project Setup and Dependency
For this article, we’ll be using a simple Maven-based project with a dependency on Angus Mail. This is the Eclipse implementation of the Jakarta Mail API specification:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.eclipse.angus</groupId>
<artifactId>angus-mail</artifactId>
<version>2.0.1</version>
</dependency>
The latest version can be found here.
3. Sending a Plain Text and an HTML Email
First, we need to configure the library with our email service provider’s credentials. Then we’ll create a Session that’ll be used in constructing our message for sending.
The configuration is via a Java Properties object:
Properties prop = new Properties();
prop.put("mail.smtp.auth", true);
prop.put("mail.smtp.starttls.enable", "true");
prop.put("mail.smtp.host", "smtp.mailtrap.io");
prop.put("mail.smtp.port", "25");
prop.put("mail.smtp.ssl.trust", "smtp.mailtrap.io");
In the properties configuration above, we configured the email host as Mailtrap and used the port provided by the service as well.
Now let’s create a session with our username and password:
Session session = Session.getInstance(prop, new Authenticator() {
@Override
protected PasswordAuthentication getPasswordAuthentication() {
return new PasswordAuthentication(username, password);
}
});
The username and password are given by the mail service provider alongside the host and port parameters.
Now that we have a mail Session object, let’s create a MimeMessage for sending:
Message message = new MimeMessage(session);
message.setFrom(new InternetAddress("[email protected]"));
message.setRecipients(
Message.RecipientType.TO, InternetAddress.parse("[email protected]"));
message.setSubject("Mail Subject");
String msg = "This is my first email using JavaMailer";
MimeBodyPart mimeBodyPart = new MimeBodyPart();
mimeBodyPart.setContent(msg, "text/html; charset=utf-8");
Multipart multipart = new MimeMultipart();
multipart.addBodyPart(mimeBodyPart);
message.setContent(multipart);
Transport.send(message);
In the snippet above, we first created a message instance with the necessary properties — to, from and subject. This is followed by a mimeBodyPart that has an encoding of text/html since our message is styled in HTML.
Next, we created an instance of MimeMultipart object that we can use to wrap the mimeBodyPart we created.
Finally, we set the multipart object as the content of our message and used the send() of Transport object to do the mail sending.
So, we can say that the mimeBodyPart is contained in the multipart that is contained in the message. This way, a multipart can contain more than one mimeBodyPart.
This is going to be the focus of the next section.
4. Sending Email With an Attachment
Next, to send an attachment, we only need to create another MimeBodyPart and attach the file(s) to it:
MimeBodyPart attachmentBodyPart = new MimeBodyPart();
attachmentBodyPart.attachFile(new File("path/to/file"));
We can then add the new body part to the MimeMultipart object we created earlier:
multipart.addBodyPart(attachmentBodyPart);
That’s all we need to do.
Once again, we set the multipart instance as the content of the message object, and finally we’ll use the send() to do the mail sending.
5. Formatting Email Text
To format and style our email text, we can use HTML and CSS tags.
For example, if we want our text to be bold, we will implement the <b> tag. For coloring the text, we can use the style tag. We can also combine HTML tags with CSS tags if we want to have additional properties, such as bold.
Let’s create a String containing bold-red text:
String msgStyled = "This is my <b style='color:red;'>bold-red email</b> using JavaMailer";
This String will hold our styled text to be sent in the email body.
6. Conclusion
In this article, we’ve seen how to use the Jakarta Mail API to send emails even with attachments.
As always, the complete source code is available over on GitHub.
