Question

I have some automated emailing tasks set up in my application. That is every day I send application specific email to customers to remind them of appointments etc. Is using Gmail’s smtp suitable for production tasks beyond just a simple message here any there? Is there any benefit to implementing my own smtp server such as Apache James?

Answer 1

I agree with @Richthofen – Using gmail to send emails in a production environment is a bad (and unethical) idea; Amazon SES or Sendgrid are the best solutions here. If you want to run your own SMTP server then please keep in mind that it will share resources with your application and will probably slow it down.

However I use gmail to test development/testing environments using javamail API. Here’s the code:

public class EmailSender{

    public void send(){
      //javamail code
      Session mailSession = createSmtpSession();
      //javamail code
    }

    private Session createSmtpSession() {
        final Properties props = new Properties();
        props.setProperty ("mail.host", "smtp.gmail.com");
        props.setProperty("mail.smtp.auth", "true");
        props.setProperty("mail.smtp.port", "" + 587);
        props.setProperty("mail.smtp.starttls.enable", "true");
        props.setProperty ("mail.transport.protocol", "smtp");
        // props.setProperty("mail.debug", "true");

        return Session.getDefaultInstance(props, new javax.mail.Authenticator() {
            protected PasswordAuthentication getPasswordAuthentication() {
                return new PasswordAuthentication(
                    "<gmail ID in user@domain format goes here>", 
                    "<password goes here>");
            }
        });
    }
}