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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-29T06:14:50+00:00

I need to develop an IMAP poller which pings an email server every few

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I need to develop an IMAP poller which pings an email server every few seconds and fetches every new email which arrives.

I’ve done it once for another application, but there I used an inbound mail channel from Spring Integration.

I just started “playing” with Play, and am not sure what the best way to achieve this is. I know that JavaMail already offers the possibility to fetch mails, but I am not sure how to actually package this. Should this be a separate module, a separate plugin, a service, or sth?

Should the polling functionality be implemented as a job?

NOTE: It is a web application BTW, although the description above may suggest it is not.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There are a few options to solve this:

    1) Use java in a Job to poll the IMAP server at regular intervals

    documentation on creating a Job is available and is pretty straight forward, just setup the job to run every minute or 5 minutes and then add the code to actually check for new emails.

    http://www.playframework.org/documentation/1.2.4/jobs

    If you’re looking for how to check for new emails on IMAP then have a look through stack exchange there. For example, to poll gmail check out this question: Getting mail from GMail into Java application using IMAP

    2) Use camel module to poll IMAP server with a custom route/processor

    This is a heavyweight solution and only recommended if you want to make use of other features of Apache Camel.

    The module is available here: http://www.playframework.org/modules/camel

    Using camel to poll for IMAP messages is fairly easy once you get your head around how to use camel, the specific info for the IMAP route is here: http://camel.apache.org/mail.html

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