How to handle multipart/alternative mail with JavaMail?

Question

I wrote an application which gets all emails from an inbox, filters the emails which contain a specific string and then puts those emails in an ArrayList.

After the ema

Answer 1

Following up on Kevin's helpful advice, analyzing your email content Java object types with respect to their canonical names (or simple names) can be helpful too. For example, looking at one inbox I've got right now, of 486 messages 399 are Strings, and 87 are MimeMultipart. This suggests that - for my typical email - a strategy that uses instanceof to first peel off Strings is best.

Of the Strings, 394 are text/plain, and 5 are text/html. This will not be the case for most; it's reflective of my email feeds into this particular inbox.

But wait - there's more!!! :-) The HTML sneaks in there nevertheless: of the 87 Multipart's, 70 are multipart/alternative. No guarantees, but most (if not all of these) are TEXT + HTML.

Of the other 17 multipart, incidentally, 15 are multipart/mixed, and 2 are multipart/signed.

My use case with this inbox (and one other) is primarily to aggregate and analyze known mailing list content. I can't ignore any of the messages, but an analysis of this sort helps me make my processing more efficient.