Sending SMTP mail when SMTP server is unavailable

[matthewjbarr]

Hi,

We're using the Java mail API to send simple emails from our system via
the company's Exchange server, which works just fine. However, we'd
like to know what happens if the SMTP server is down, and whether there
is a technique available to queue the sent messages in the event of the
SMTP service being unavailable, so that they may be resent at a later
date.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Matt

 

[Juha Laiho]

(e-mail address removed) said:

We're using the Java mail API to send simple emails from our system via
the company's Exchange server, which works just fine. However, we'd
like to know what happens if the SMTP server is down, and whether there
is a technique available to queue the sent messages in the event of the
SMTP service being unavailable, so that they may be resent at a later
date.

If it's your application that is directly using the Java Mail API,
then you are apparently calling an implementation of
javax.mail.Transport.send() . This is documented to throw
javax.mail.SendFailedException if sending the message does not
succeed for some reason. So, to recover from this, you catch this
exception, and write logic in your application to handle queuing the
message.

So, the Java Mail API does not provide any queuing mechanism; if
you need one, you'll need to implement it.

 

[matthewjbarr]

Thanks Wolf.

Matt

 

[Roedy Green]

We're using the Java mail API to send simple emails from our system via
the company's Exchange server, which works just fine. However, we'd
like to know what happens if the SMTP server is down, and whether there
is a technique available to queue the sent messages in the event of the
SMTP service being unavailable, so that they may be resent at a later
date.

the easiest way to handle it would be to run your own local
mailserver. That's what they are for, queuing mail to send and
receive.