如何使用java socket通过imap从gmail中读取邮件

Question

I'm kinda interested in with java sockets in these days and i want to read my mails from gmail with using java socket. is it possible?

Socket s;
s = new Socket("imap.gmail.com", 993);
InputStream in;
in = s.getInputStream();
BufferedReader sin = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(in));
PrintWriter output = new PrintWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(s.getOutputStream()));
String line;
output.println("a001 LOGIN my-e-mail my-pass");
output.flush();
while ((line = sin.readLine()) != null)
System.out.println(line);
s.close();

what should i do after connecting to socket?

thanks in advance. (notice: i dont want to use java mail api, things get really easy with it, i'm just choosing this way to get familiar what's going on behind the scene)

edited the code.

Answer 1

If you feel like getting familiar with IMAP at GMail, you're going to have to put SSL/TLS on top of it. All GMail traffic is encrypted.

Answer 2

Once you have a socket you implement the IMAP protocol on it.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501

Answer 3

+1 for the question.

EDIT: Yes, it is possible to speak to IMAP server using java sockets and in some cases it might be advisable to do so rather than using java mail library.

Using javamail is the easy way out. It is also appears to be the obvious solution but, there are cases when you do not want to go that route.

Javamail is highly unsuiatble for scaled out deployments with a large number of concurrent users that need to be kept notified on near real time basis.

Say, you want to service more than 1000 users per jvm and want to keep the overhead of creating imap connections low then, you will resort to implementing sockets yourself and write IMAP commands in the socket itself. Needless to say, other benefits include near instantaneous delivery of a new email to your user ie if you are using AJAX.

Near instantaneous email is one of the few things left to like about Blackberry. Given RIMs scale, I don't think they would be using Javamail on top of IMAP to push out emails. That would be highly non-performant.