Question

I am trying to connect to the POP server through Sockets in Java. I did the following code to run a LIST command to list all the emails from the server. But I don’t know why on the second readLine() to read the second line and onwards, my application hangs at there.

popSock = new Socket(mailHost, pop_PORT);
inn = popSock.getInputStream();
outt = popSock.getOutputStream();
in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inn));
out = new PrintWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(outt), true);

//USER and PASS commands to auth the server are ok

out.println("LIST");
String response = in.readLine();
System.out.println(response);

//Attempt to read the second line from the buffer but it hangs at here.
response = in.readLine();
System.out.println(response);

On the second in.readLine(), the application gets stuck at here and doesn’t proceed from here. When I run the LIST command on telnet, I get the whole list of emails. So I should get the same response from the socket but I am not. How should I read the whole response line by line from the server?

Answer 1

readLine() won’t return until it’s read a carriage return or a line feed, which is what you normally get when you read from a terminal or a text file.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the POP server doesn’t actually tack \r\n on the end of its messages. Try read() instead.