Is “sendmail service” necessary for sending emails with Apache Commons Email Component which works throgh Java Mail API (javax.mail.jar)?

Question

My Java Web Application (running on Tomcat 7 in Jelastic Cloud) is sending emails using Apache Commons Email Component . This component is built on top of the Java Mail API (javax.mail.jar) .

Cloud hoster (Jelastic) says that "sendmail service is not running/available" (in case you do not purchase IPv4 for hosting - I do not need it, my application just parses certain web sites and sends parsing results to email - no GUI (http request/webpage), on deployment ServletContextListener starts Quartz timer which then runs forever.

Is this "sendmail service" vital/necessary for my emails to be sent/received correctly?

Jelastic support did not answer this question.

So far email works, but during trial sendmail service is not disabled - this "sendmail service is not running/available" applies after trial period, and now as my trial is going, it works but maybe just because sendmail service is not stopped during trial.

Is sendmail service necessary for sending emails with Apache Commons Email Component which works throgh Java Mail API (javax.mail.jar)?

Answer 1

You need access to a mail server that supports the SMTP protocol. sendmail is one such server. You can also used hosted mail services such as Gmail.