Simple Java Mail

Simple Java Mail is a robust Java mailing library built to make production email simple to use: rich content, recipient governance, signing and encryption, transport security, configuration, diagnostics, conversion, and high-throughput batch or clustered sending.

It keeps those concerns behind a consistent high-level API, while still giving you fluent builders, property/Spring configuration, defaults and overrides, validation, logging, and lower-level Jakarta Mail escape hatches when you need them.

Under the hood, Simple Java Mail sits on top of Angus Mail (previously Jakarta Mail).

Simple Java Mail remains Java 8-compatible; Java 8 is the source, target, and minimum supported runtime.

Documentation

The full user documentation lives at simplejavamail.org. Start there for the minimal banner example, grand examples, feature guides, configuration reference, diagnostics, and module overview.

• Features
• Configuration and Spring support
• Security
• Logging and debugging
• Modules
• CLI
• 9.0 migration notes

Installation

Simple Java Mail is available in Maven Central:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.simplejavamail</groupId>
    <artifactId>simple-java-mail</artifactId>
    <version>9.1.0</version>
</dependency>

Read about additional modules you can add here: simplejavamail.org/modules.

Development

• Project mechanisms catalogue for optional module loading, CLI metadata generation, MIME selection, proxy bridging, concurrency, and non-null instrumentation.
• API expansion workflow for adding public API fields or builder methods.
• Developer environment setup for JDK and build constraints.

Latest progress

v9.1.0 - Maven Central

• #653: a configurable SMTP client hostname for the EHLO / HELO command.
• #654: SMTP submission receipts for reading the server acceptance response after a send.
• No breaking changes; existing sendMail(...) behavior is unchanged.

v9.0.0 - v9.0.4 - Maven Central

The Short Version

Simple Java Mail has been going strong-ish for about 20 years, and 9.0.0 rolls roughly two years of backlog into a new major release.

simple-java-mail
└── outlook-message-parser
    └── rtf-to-html
└── java-utils-mail-dkim
└── java-utils-mail-smime
└── smtp-connection-pool
    └── clustered-object-pool
        └── generic-object-pool
└── java-socks-proxy-server

Across Simple Java Mail and the supporting libraries that keep the stack moving, more than 100 GitHub issues and PRs were reviewed, fixed, merged, or closed while keeping the project Java 8-compatible.

Major features: the dedicated recipient builder API, per-recipient S/MIME certificates, first-class Delivery Status Notification support, pre-encoded attachment and embedded-image sending, mailer-level DKIM defaults, and simple batch/open-connection sending without the batch module. Enhancements: broader Outlook conversion metadata, MIME resource handling, content-transfer encoding control, debug routing, local SMTP bind configuration, batch cluster configuration, and Java module support.

Migration Note

This is a breaking major release. The old recipient-addition method jungle has been cleaned up in favor of the recipient builder API, so code that relied on the removed recipient overloads needs to migrate. Start with the 9.0 migration notes before upgrading.

Major Features

• #613: Recipient builder API: added dedicated builders for constructing single recipients and recipient collections.
• #297: Per-recipient S/MIME certificates: enabled encrypted mail for multiple recipients with different certificates.
• #574: Delivery Status Notification (DSN): added first-class DSN configuration.
• #573: Pre-encoded resources: added pre-encoded attachment and embedded-image APIs.
• #196: Mailer-level DKIM defaults: added default DKIM signing configuration so DKIM can be configured once per Mailer.
• #569: Simple batch and open-connection sending: added sendMailsInSimpleBatch(...) for sequential batch work without the batch module and withOpenConnection(...) for callback-scoped reuse of a single SMTP connection.

Enhancements

• #614: Outlook conversion metadata: added explicit result APIs for inspecting source .msg headers and metadata without copying structural headers into converted emails, resolving #609.
• #645: Outlook last-modifier metadata: exposed PR_LAST_MODIFIER_NAME / 0x3FFA as OutlookMessageData#getLastModifierName() without treating it as sender identity.
• #605: Per-body content-transfer encoding: added Content-Transfer-Encoding configuration for plain text, HTML, and calendar content.
• #566, #597, #602, #607: MIME resource Content-ID handling: improved explicit IDs, parsed embedded images, and generated fallback IDs.
• #589: Jakarta Mail debug output: added configurable debug output routing.
• #568: Local SMTP bind address: added configuration for multi-IP SMTP hosts.
• #565, #618: Batch cluster configuration: fixed Java API cluster configuration and added property-defined cluster configurations for property-file and Spring-configured clustered sending.
• #572, #571: S/MIME conversion leniency: tolerate unsupported S/MIME payloads during Outlook conversion and preserve parsed email content when signature verification fails.
• #606: MIME type sanitizing: sanitize malformed resource MIME types before generating attachment and embedded-image headers.
• #541: Resource headers: removed the non-standard filename parameter from resource Content-Type headers; filenames remain available through Content-Disposition.
• #265, #237: Java module support: added Java 9 module descriptors to the core and facade jars so modular applications can require org.simplejavamail directly.

Fixes and Compatibility

• #615: Async test connections: fixed MailerGenericBuilder.async() so no-arg testConnection() uses the configured async default.
• #611: SMTPS custom SSL socket factories: fixed custom SSL socket factory configuration for SMTPS mailers.
• #535: Async failure reporting: let async send and connection-test failures surface through the returned CompletableFuture without duplicate framework error logs.
• #583: Java 25 CLI startup: fixed CLI startup on Java 25.
• #616: CLI optional-argument detection: removed the runtime JetBrains annotation fork from CLI optional-argument detection.
• #652: RFC 2047 address validation: reject encoded-word syntax inside address specs during validation while keeping encoded display names valid.
• Standalone CLI command cleanup: send, connect, and validate now wait for command work and close mailer resources, preventing batch-module resources from keeping the process alive.

Dependency and Supporting-Library Updates

• Core dependency maintenance: bumped JMail to 2.1.0 (#634), commons-io to 2.22.0 (#579, #627), Kryo to 5.6.2 (#586), Zip4j to 2.11.5 (#587), SubEthaSMTP to 7.2.2 (#593, #632), Angus Mail to 2.0.4 (#604), Jakarta Mail API to 2.1.5 with Jakarta Activation / Angus Activation alignment, Objenesis to 3.5 (#580, #635), Lombok to 1.18.46 (#636), AssertJ Core to 3.27.7 (#622), and SpotBugs annotations to 4.10.2 (#629).
• Logging dependencies: aligned Log4j to 2.25.4 (#624) and SLF4J API to 2.0.18 (#631), keeping the Log4j bridge on log4j-slf4j2-impl for SLF4J 2.x.

Supporting Libraries

• utils-mail-dkim 3.3.0: added configurable DNS provider URL support for DKIM domain-key TXT lookups, fixed the published automatic module name, and kept packaged artifacts free of JaCoCo probes.
• clustered-object-pool 4.0.1 (#6): added cluster-specific Java configuration for pool defaults, claim timeout, and load balancing.
• smtp-connection-pool 3.0.1 (#8): pulled in clustered-object-pool 4.0.1 so the batch-module fix for #565 can keep connection-pool defaults per cluster key.
• smtp-connection-pool 3.0.0: made clustered SMTP pools generic over their cluster-key type and kept already-unusable connections from surfacing as generic pool error logs during transport close.
• java-socks-proxy-server 4.2.0: updated SOCKS live tests to use dynamic proxy ports instead of fixed ports.
• outlook-message-parser 1.16.1: improved Outlook .msg conversion by preserving nested message attachment metadata, fixing sent-date extraction (#534), fixing recipient bucket parsing (#504), broadening S/MIME detection, improving RTF-only body conversion (#576), avoiding browser-default <pre> styling for Outlook plain-text RTF conversion (#651), updating Apache POI, and exposing Outlook last-modifier source metadata.

Build and Test Maintenance

• Build plugins and test stack: bumped Maven Surefire Plugin to 3.5.6 (#592, #625), Maven Clean Plugin to 3.5.0 (#626), Appassembler Maven Plugin to 2.1.0 (#581), Exec Maven Plugin to 3.5.0 (#582), Maven Assembly Plugin to 3.8.0, Maven Deploy Plugin to 3.1.4 (#619), Maven Install Plugin to 3.1.4 (#639), Maven Javadoc Plugin to 3.12.0 (#637), Maven GPG Plugin to 3.2.8 (#621), Nexus Staging Maven Plugin to 1.7.0, and JaCoCo Maven Plugin to 0.8.15 (#638); aligned JUnit Platform/Jupiter at 1.14.4/5.14.4 while preserving Java 8 compatibility (#596, #633); kept JUnit Pioneer on 1.9.1 because 2.x is Java 11 bytecode (#630); added Dependabot ignore rules for Java 11-only upgrade lines; restored release packaging for generated source-license headers and standalone CLI ZIP/TAR classifier artifacts; and replaced live embedded-image URL tests with deterministic local coverage (#617).

The full stand-alone release history is maintained in RELEASE_HISTORY.md.