This brief tutorial will show how to send e-mail using Spring and JavaMail. JavaMail can handle e-mail storage as well, but here we're just worrying about sending e-mail.

I happen to be using Spring 2.5 but this ought to work for earlier versions of Spring as well (at least Spring 2.0 I think).

Let's jump right in. You can configure your JavaMail session either in Spring itself or with JNDI. We'll look at both alternatives.

Alternative 1: Configuring JavaMail with Spring

You may be operating in an environment where you don't have a JNDI enterprise naming context (ENC) available. Or you may have some reason not to use it even if you do have a JNDI ENC. For example, I've written a simple application monitor, and I'll be adding e-mail alerting shortly. This is a standalone app and so there's no JNDI ENC. No problem; I can just configure JavaMail in the Spring application context configuration as shown below.

<!-- Mail service -->
<bean id="mailSender" class="org.springframework.mail.javamail.JavaMailSenderImpl">
    <property name="host" value="your.smtphost.com"/>
    <property name="port" value="25"/>
    <property name="username" value="yourusername"/>
    <property name="password" value="yourpassword"/>
    <property name="javaMailProperties">
        <props>
            <!-- Use SMTP-AUTH to authenticate to SMTP server -->
            <prop key="mail.smtp.auth">true</prop>
            <!-- Use TLS to encrypt communication with SMTP server -->
            <prop key="mail.smtp.starttls.enable">true</prop>
        </props>
    </property>
</bean>

This bean is, as its name suggests, a mail sender. It is basically a wrapper around JavaMail SMTP, and the configuration reflects that. In the example I'm showing how you would enable SMTP-AUTH (supports authentication to the SMTP server) and TLS (supports message encryption), assuming your SMTP server has those capabilities. For more information see my article SMTP and SMTP-AUTH.

IMPORTANT: You will need to inject mailSender into your mail-sending service bean.

So that's how to configure JavaMail from Spring. Now here's how to do the same thing with JNDI, which you may want to do if you're running in an environment with a JNDI ENC (like an app server or a servlet container).