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Sandeep Poonia
Sandeep Poonia

Reputation: 2188

Java Mail API: Find if a mail is forwarded mail or a reply to another mail

I have a very special requirement

I am using Java Mail API to access a user's Inbox. You can say its like a service inbox for complaints. User registers a complaint by sending an email to this address. I fetch every email from Inbox and create a new complaint. My problem is that I don't want to create unnecessary complaints for reply or forwarded emails. Is there a way to find out that.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 5861

Answers (2)

devnull
devnull

Reputation: 123608

Reading the email header might help, see http://javamail.kenai.com/nonav/javadocs/javax/mail/Part.html#getAllHeaders(). In case of replies, the message header would include:

In-Reply-To: Message-ID of the message that this is a reply to

In case of a forwarded message, selected headers might be preserved. Not as straight-forward as the previous case, but it might still be possible to determine if it was a forwarded message. Refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_forwarding#Manual_client-based_forwarding for details.

Upvotes: 2

mthmulders
mthmulders

Reputation: 9705

Most email clients add Re: or Fwd: to the subject line, but I wouldn't rely on that to determine whether an email is a reply or forwarded text; for example, a German mailclient might put Betr.: in front of the original subject.

Instead, you might want to look at the In-Reply-To: header and/or the References: header. See RFC 4021 for detailed information on those headers.

You can retrieve the headers from a Message by calling the getHeader(java.lang.String) method.

Upvotes: 4

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