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Asked: 2026-05-10T20:35:56+00:00

I’ve been running the built-in Ant from the command line on a Macintosh (10.5.5)

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I’ve been running the built-in Ant from the command line on a Macintosh (10.5.5) and have run into some trouble with the Mail task. Running the Mail task produces the following message:

[mail] Failed to initialise MIME mail: org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.email.MimeMailer

This is most likely due to a missing ant-javamail.jar file in the /usr/share/ant/lib directory. I see a ‘ant-javamail-1.7.0.pom’ file in this directory but not the appropriate jar file. Anyone know why this jar file might be missing and what the best way to resolve the problem is?

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1 Answer

  1. Here’s what I ended up doing to resolve the problem:

    1. Downloaded the latest version of Ant from http://ant.apache.org/
    2. The ‘built-in’ Ant is installed in /usr/share/ant; I didn’t want to overwrite that version so I extracted the new, full version into /usr/local/share/apache-ant-1.7.1/
    3. As npellow points out, the the Mac doesn’t include mail.jar or activation.jar — these files can be downloaded and extracted from JavaMail API and JavaBeans Activation Framework respectively and copied to the new ant lib folder (same folder as all the ant-*.jar files)
    4. The ant command (/usr/bin/ant) is a symbolic link to /usr/share/ant/bin/ant; I updated this link to point to the new version (ln -s /usr/local/share/apache-ant-1.7.1/bin/ant /usr/bin/ant)

    If for some reason you need to make the old version of Ant the default again, just use
    ln -s /usr/share/ant/bin/ant /usr/bin/ant

    Steps 2-4 were done at the command prompt as root. That’s it — the Mac now has the latest, complete version of Ant and the Mail task works just fine.

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