Frank Sommers
Posts: 2642
Nickname: fsommers
Registered: Jan, 2002
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Re: Email clients and web based email
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Posted: Apr 19, 2002 11:11 PM
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Hi Hiran,
Actually, your post is directed to the right forum. What you want, indeed, indicates the main raison d'etre for Web services. SMTP, POP, or IMAP are service-oriented network protocols: they expose well-defined functionality to clients over the network, and you want software (your email client) to directly access these services.
However, I don't think Web-based email providers offer this service yet, at least, not for free. Here's Yahoo's policy, for instance:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/pop/pop-02.html
Obviously, most ISPs offer direct POP or IMAP access to their email services. In Yahoo's case, they offered email forwarding to a real ISP for free; now they charge for this service.
I guess this really doesn't help you, but it does make a good point for Web services: To have is a proxy out on the network representing your email account. Regardless of how you connect to the network, you'd like to find that proxy and invoke methods on it in support of reading your mail. Then you can have a servlet process those method invocations and format the messages into HTML, or have Eudora or Netscape or Lookout (sorry, Outlook) display them. Either way, those intermediate components would interact with the same proxy instance, coming through the wire into the execution space where the mail client needs to have access to those services. And that proxy could adapt to whatever communications protocol is most appropriate for the environment -- maybe HTTP, BlueTooth, plain TCP, SOAP, whatever. That would be completely hidden from the mail client.
I guess you did post this to the wrong forum -- it should have gone to the Jini Forum :-) Or maybe not.
> Is there an easy way for my app to access web based
> email services? I'm using Java, and I know that java
> has classes to help with POP3 and SMTP. But what if I
> wanted to login into and retrieve emails from web
> based services (like Hotmail).
>Is there any way to do
> it apart from retreiving and parsing the HTML files
> for the appropriate links and following them?
> Thanks.
> Hiran
>
>PS. This post might be better suited to the Java
> Answers Forum, but I wasn't sure, so I decided to
> place it in this forum.
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