How to Send Email from Java Program with Example

Sending Email from Java program is a common requirement. It doesn't matter whether you are working on core Java application, web application or enterprise Java EE application, you may need to send email to alert support personal with errors, or just send email to users on registration, password reset or asking them to confirm their email after registration. There are many such scenarios, where you need ability to send emails from Java program. In mature applications, you already have a module or library dealing with all king of email functionality and issues e.g. ability to send attachments, images, including signatures and other rich text formatting on emails, but if you have to code something from scratch then Java's Mail API is perfect place. In this article, we will learn how to send emails from Java application using mail API ( javax.mail ) . Before writing code, you must know some email basics e.g. you need a SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server. If you are running your Java application in Linux, then you should know that SMTP daemon by default listen on port 25. You can use any mail server to send emails from Java, including public email servers like GMail, Yahoo or any other provider, all you need is their SMTP server details e.g. hostname, port, connection parameters etc. You can also use SSL, TLS to securely connect and send emails, but in this example we have kept it simple and just focusing on minimum logic to send mail from Java application. In further articles, we will learn how to send mail using attachments, how to send HTML formatted email, how to attach images in emails, how to use SSL authentication to connect GMail Server and send emails etc. For now, let's understand this simple example of Java Mail API.