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| <document> |
| <properties> |
| <title>Mime4j</title> |
| </properties> |
| <body> |
| <section name="Mime4j"> |
| <p> |
| <strong>NOTE:</strong> mime4j is now a subproject of |
| <a href="http://james.apache.org/">Apache James</a>. Please use |
| the James mailing list for mime4j related questions. Downloads |
| will still be available from the sourceforge project page. |
| </p> |
| <p> mime4j provides a parser, |
| <a href="apidocs/org/mime4j/MimeStreamParser.html"> |
| <code>MimeStreamParser</code> |
| </a>, for e-mail message streams in plain rfc822 and MIME |
| format. The parser uses a callback mechanism to report parsing |
| events such as the start of an entity header, the start of a |
| body, etc. If you are familiar with the <a |
| href="http://www.saxproject.org/">SAX</a> XML parser interface |
| you should have no problem getting started with mime4j. </p> |
| <p> The parser only deals with the structure of the message stream. |
| It won't do any decoding of base64 or quoted-printable encoded |
| header fields and bodies. This is intentional - the parser |
| should only provide the most basic functionality needed to build |
| more complex parsers. However, mime4j does include facilities to |
| decode bodies and fields and the <code>Message</code> class |
| described below handles decoding of fields and bodies |
| transparently. </p> |
| <p> The parser has been designed to be extremely tolerant against |
| messages violating the standards. It has been tested using a |
| large corpus (>5000) of e-mail messages. As a benchmark |
| the widely used perl <a |
| href="http://www.zeegee.com/code/perl/MIME-tools/">MIME::Tools</a> |
| parser has been used. mime4j and MIME:Tools rarely differ |
| (<25 in those 5000). When they do (which only occurs |
| for illegally formatted spam messages) we think mime4j does a |
| better job. </p> |
| <p> mime4j can also be used to build a tree representation of an |
| e-mail message using the |
| <a href="apidocs/org/mime4j/message/Message.html"> |
| <code>Message</code> |
| </a> class. Using this facility mime4j automatically handles the |
| decoding of fields and bodies and uses temporary files for large |
| attachments. This representation is similar to the |
| representation constructed by the JavaMail API:s but is more |
| tolerant to messages violating the standards. </p> |
| </section> |
| </body> |
| </document> |
