Sending email programmatically on a Mac using Java (through Mac Mail Client)

Question

I've done quite a bit of research on this matter and I can't seem to come up with a solid solution to my problem.

I am developing a Java client application that (should) allow users to import their contacts from Mac Address Book by fetching them in a list format and allowing the user to select a subset/all and click a button that would send an "invitation" to these users.

I was able to grab contacts using the Rococoa Java framework but I am uncertain as to how to send email or if it is even possible. I realize there are security concerns with this, but I was able to accomplish this same task on Outlook for PC.

It seems that I may have to call an Applescript from my Java that manually opens Mac Mail Client and sends email using their default mail account setup.

I could be totally off-base here... should I even bother sending mail through the user's default Mail account? I wanted to avoid using a different mail server to avoid spam etc.

Any help would be appreciated, thank you for your time.

• Matt

Answer 1

Here's an applescript to use Mail...

set emailSender to "sender@email.com>"
set emailTo to "recipient@email.com"
set theSubject to "The subject of the mail"
set theContent to "message body"

tell application "Mail"
    set newMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {sender:emailSender, subject:theSubject, content:theContent, visible:true}
    tell newMessage
        make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {address:emailTo}
        send
    end tell
end tell

Another option, if you know the smtp information, is to use python. I made a command line program you can use. Find it here. There's example code to use it on the web page.