Question

I am using javamail to automate some email handling.

I managed to get a connection to the pop3 server and fetch the messages. Some of them contains an attachment. Base on the email title I am able to “predict” the filename of the attachment that I need to fetch.

But I can’t get its content 🙁

I have a function

public byte[] searchForContent(Part part,String fileName){
    if(part.getFileName()!=null){
        if(part.getFileName().equals(fileName)){
            byte[] content = new byte[part.getSize()];
            part.getInputStream().read(content);
            return content[]
        }
    }
    return null;
}

The function works very well (ie: return content only if the part was the attachment described by fileName). But the array its returns is too big.

The downloaded attachment is 256 bytes long and the function return a 352 bytes long content.

I think that the problem comes from the headers, but I can’t be sure.

How would you proceed to get the content only ?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I finally found a solution.

As eaj told : part.getSize() returns the size of the part object. Not the size of the attachment itself.

However the InputStream returned by part.getInputStream() contains the content of the attachment only.

So the code below does give the expected result :

public byte[] searchForContent(Part part,String fileName){
    if(part.getFileName()!=null){
        if(part.getFileName().equals(fileName)){
            InputStream stream=part.getInputStream();

            byte[] buffer = new byte[512];
            ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

            int bytesRead;
            while ((bytesRead = stream.read(buffer) != -1)
            {
                baos.write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
            }
            return baos.toByteArray();
        }
    }
    return null;
}