Connectivity story: POP3 connectivity

As a Zero application programmer, I want to be able to look at a POP3 server to see if there are any emails present, and if so to be able to be able to kick off an application to handle that message, using any of the normal sMash application styles (Java, scripting or a flow). If the applicaiton processing works OK then I want the message to be deleted from the server. The primary use for this will be with a message of some sort (quite likely XML) that is in the main body, or in an attachment, though it might also be necessary to be able to look at multiple attachments, or bodies.

Details

Some enterprise applications communicate by sending emails that are then accessed using POP3. To communicate with these I need to be able to:

• Use SMTP to send the emails - this is already available in WebSphere sMash.
• Have a kicker that can use the POP3 protocol to check for emails on a server
  • Authenticate using userid and password
  • SSL would be nice to protect the connection, but this may not be in v1.1
• Have a receiver to read the message and fire a mailMessage.
• Allow flows to be called from mailMessage event
• Have activities to interact with the mail message in the global context
  • An activity to read the main body from the message and put it on the output of the activity
  • An activity to find an attachment based on position in the list, the attachment file name or the attachment content type, or an AND combination of those.
  • An activity to extract the content of an attachment an place it on the output of the activity
• POP3 will only be used to kick off applications - the Connection API does not need to provide this function

-- NickB - 03 Sep 2008