Module jakarta.mail
Package jakarta.mail.internet

Class MimeMessage

java.lang.Object
jakarta.mail.Message
jakarta.mail.internet.MimeMessage
All Implemented Interfaces:
MimePart, Part
public class MimeMessage extends Message implements MimePart
This class represents a MIME style email message. It implements the Message abstract class and the MimePart interface.

Clients wanting to create new MIME style messages will instantiate an empty MimeMessage object and then fill it with appropriate attributes and content.

Service providers that implement MIME compliant backend stores may want to subclass MimeMessage and override certain methods to provide specific implementations. The simplest case is probably a provider that generates a MIME style input stream and leaves the parsing of the stream to this class.

MimeMessage uses the InternetHeaders class to parse and store the top level RFC 822 headers of a message.

The mail.mime.address.strict session property controls the parsing of address headers. By default, strict parsing of address headers is done. If this property is set to "false", strict parsing is not done and many illegal addresses that sometimes occur in real messages are allowed. See the InternetAddress class for details.

A note on RFC 822 and MIME headers

RFC 822 header fields must contain only US-ASCII characters. MIME allows non ASCII characters to be present in certain portions of certain headers, by encoding those characters. RFC 2047 specifies the rules for doing this. The MimeUtility class provided in this package can be used to to achieve this. Callers of the setHeader, addHeader, and addHeaderLine methods are responsible for enforcing the MIME requirements for the specified headers. In addition, these header fields must be folded (wrapped) before being sent if they exceed the line length limitation for the transport (1000 bytes for SMTP). Received headers may have been folded. The application is responsible for folding and unfolding headers as appropriate.

See Also: