Using a source file to test behaviors

Question

I am developing some special mail handling features, based on the message content and some library information that I have. I don't want to go to the trouble of setting up a POP3 server since I have the test data in flat files.
Has anyone developed any kind of implementation that creates Message instances from flat files?
For the time being, I don't need a Session, a Store, an INBOX or any of the other accoutrements.
Any thoughts will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance
Chris

Answer 1

If you are on Windows you can just create a message in Outlook Express, then save it as a .eml file. This is just a plain text file in MIME format. (You can probably do the same from most simple email client apps... except Outlook).
To load this in to a Javamail object, you will still need a Session (which in-turn means you need an SMTP Server, although the server just has to be a valid IP belonging to a computer which is network accessible). I typically use the com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPMessage for simple SMTPMessage operations. You can load this from you .eml file like this:
FileInputStream fileSource = new FileInputStream(yourEMLFile);
Session session = Session.getInstance(null, null);
SMTPMessage message = new SMTPMessage(session, fileSource);Or if you want to use the javax.mail.internet.MimeMessage class just use this instead. It has the same session/stream constructor