AuthenticationFailedException when using JNDI and JavaMail with SMTP auth

Question

Hi all - I've been banging my head on this one for awhile now - hopefully someone else has done this.
We are working in a servlet container (tomcat), and need obtain a mail session from JNDI. We do this as follows:
               Context initCtx = new InitialContext();
               Context envCtx = (Context) initCtx.lookup("java:comp/env");
               Session mailSession=(Session) envCtx.lookup("mailSession/trumpetinc");so far so good. The jndi entry for the mail session is configured in server.xml as follows:
          <Resource name="mailSession/trumpetinc" scope="Shareable" type="javax.mail.Session"/>
          <ResourceParams name="mailSession/trumpetinc">
            <parameter>
              <name>mail.smtp.host</name>
              <value>mail.server.com</value>
            </parameter>
            <parameter>
              <name>mail.smtp.password</name>
              <value>ABCDEFG</value>
            </parameter>
            <parameter>
              <name>mail.smtp.user</name>
              <value>trumpet_kevin</value>
            </parameter>
         <parameter>
           <name>mail.smtp.auth</name>
           <value>true</value>
         </parameter>
          </ResourceParams>With the above, whenever we hit Transport.send(msg), we got an AuthenticationFailedException thrown. I have run into this before with SMTP authentication, so I decided to try using the transport.sendMessage() method instead.
So, I get the transport:
Transport trans = mailSession.getTransport("smtp");
trans.connect();Then I send my message using:
msg.saveChanges();
trans.sendMessage(msg, msg.getAllRecipients());and finally, I close the transport:
trans.close();Unfortunately, I'm still getting the exception. Is it possible that my connect() method is not picking up the JNDI properties set in the server.xml file (this seems likely)? If so, what's the best way for me to get those properties so I can set them explicitly in the connect() method?
Thanks in advance,
- Kevin

Answer 1

Hi,
I have faced the same problem and after some googling and trying I have discovered what causes the AuthenticationFailedException exception. I just wanted to share the knowedge maybe it will be helpfull to others.
Here it is what the API says:
To use SMTP authentication you'll need to set the mail.smtp.auth property (see below) and provide the SMTP Transport with a username and password when connecting to the SMTP server. You can do this using one of the following approaches:
1.Provide an Authenticator object when creating your mail Session and provide the username and password information during the Authenticator callback.
Note that the mail.smtp.user property can be set to provide a default username for the callback, but the password will still need to be supplied explicitly.
This approach allows you to use the static Transport send method to send messages.
2.Call the Transport connect method explicitly with username and password arguments.
This approach requires you to explicitly manage a Transport object and use the Transport sendMessage method to send the message. The transport.java demo program demonstrates how to manage a Transport object. The following is roughly equivalent to the static Transport send method, but supplies the needed username and password:
Using the Transport.connect makes the JNDI not very helpfull for configuration.
It seems that using just the mail.smtp.user and mail.smtp.pass is not sufficient for the authentication.
so, the solution is :
just place these to lines in the JNDI configuration:
          username="test"
          password="test1"
so it should looks as follows:
          <Resource name="mail/Session" auth="Container"
          type="javax.mail.Session"
          username="test"
          password="test1"
          mail.transport.protocol="smtp"
          mail.smtp.auth="true"     
          mail.smtp.host="localhost"
          mail.smtp.port="25"
          mail.smtp.user="test"
          mail.smtp.password="test1"
/>
where test and test1 are the user's credentials
Regards,
Kiril
Message was edited by:
Kireto
Message was edited by:
Kireto