How to send messages to "incorrect" email addresses?

Question

Hi everyone
I hope, I'm not repeating a topic that was discussed before...
My problem:
I need to send emails to a email to facs gateway to have them delivered to the recipient by facs. The sytax for the gateway (product name Faxination) is
[fax:username@faxnumber] or
[fax:faxnumber]
and will be parsed by the facs gateway.
Of course, such email addresses are illegal in terms of RFC822 and thus cannot be parsed correctly into InternetAddress objects.
To ommit the parsing of the address, I subclassed javax.mail.internet.InternetAddress to be able to access the protected member directly to inject my addresses into a derived object of InternetAddress. So far, everything worked, but unfortunately the Transport.send() method checks all recipients by calling the static method InternetAddress.parse(String) on them for reasons I cannot really follow...
The problem is: subclassing is inadequate here because I cannot override static methods.
I would have been nice from the designers of JavaMail and the standard mail provider from Sun to allow a user to reasonably subclass InternetAddress to provide the means to allow illegal addresses to be handled without checking them first.
Does anyone know a solution to that problem?
Any hint is appreciated.
Daniel

Answer 1

Reading through the JavaDoc for JavaMail 1.3 I found the following constructor for InternetAddress.
InternetAddress
public InternetAddress(java.lang.String address,boolean strict)
throws AddressExceptionParse the given string and create an InternetAddress.
If strict is false, the detailed syntax of the address isn't checked.
Parameters:
address - the address in RFC822 format
strict - enforce RFC822 syntax
Throws:AddressException - if the parse failed
Since: JavaMail 1.3
http://java.sun.com/products/javamail/1.3/docs/javadocs/javax/mail/internet/InternetAddress.html