Reading Email Envelopes

Class ReadMessageEnvelopes provides methods for reading message envelopes. This may be beneficial in a scenario where you first have to scan the messages on the server, before to decide which one you really want to read. In contrast to class ReadMessages, methods of ReadMessageEnvelopes do not read and transfer the whole message content (such as content and attachments, which could be rather large), but only the header fields (sender, recipient etc.). Therefore, these methods will perform better and use less memory in comparison to methods of the ReadMessages class.

Figure: The ReadMessageEnvelopes Class

All methods of ReadMessageEnvelopes return an Array of MailEnvelope objects:

Figure: The MailEnvelope Class

Reading Specific Message Envelopes Using Retrieval Constraints

You can specify which message envelopes to retrieve by providing a constraints object to the readMessageEnvelopesWithConstraints method:

Parameters of method readMessageEnvelopesWithConstraints in detail:

Name	Type	Direction	Remarks
connection	MailConnection	In	Specifies connection details such as server name, protocol etc. (see Mail Connection).
constraints	RetrievalConstraints	In	Specifies constraints for mails to retrieve (see Mail Retrieval Constraints).
return	Array of MailEnvelope	Return	An array containing mail envelopes matching the constraints, or an empty array, if no emails were found.

Reading all Message Envelopes from the Inbox Folder

Method readMessageEnvelopes reads all message envelopes from the inbox folder:

JavaMail_ReadMessageEnvelopes_readMessageEnvelopes

Parameters of method readMessageEnvelopes in detail:

Name	Type	Direction	Description
connection	MailConnection	In	Specifies connection details such as server name, protocol etc. (see Mail Connection).
return	Array of MailEnvelope	Return	An array containing mail envelopes from the inbox folder, or an empty array, if no emails were found.

Reading Message Envelopes from an Arbitrary Folder

You can read email envelopes from an arbitrary folder on the mail server by using the readMessageEnvelopesByFolder method:

JavaMail_ReadMessageEnvelopes_readEnvelopesByFolder

Parameters of method readMessageEnvelopesByFolder in detail:

Name	Type	Direction	Description
connection	MailConnection	In	Specifies connection details such as server name, protocol etc. (see Mail Connection).
folder	String	In	Specifies the folder on the mail server.
return	Array of MailEnvelope	Return	An array containing mail envelopes from the specified folder, or an empty array, if no emails were found.