How Can achieve delivery failure notice mail using Spring JavMail?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com//questions/12665326

  •  11-12-2019
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Question

I am using Spring JavaMail for my Email communication application. How Can achieve the functionality that when a email delivery fails due the reason of wrong email address?

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Solution

Achieving this reliably is not trivial. The protocol specs for SMTP in RFC 821 specifies a number of return codes. Notably 550 is what an SMTP server should return when attempting to send an email to a nonexistent address. I say should because most public-facing SMTP servers won't do this - they either quietly accepts the message and then drops it or, if they are a little more good-mannered, accepts the message but sends a "delivery failed" notice back to the sender ("from" address). Public services like MSN and Gmail will also blacklist senders if they send enough emails to non-existing addresses to prevent spam.

The reason for this is to prevent email-fishing and spamming.

So what you can do is to

  1. Check for SendFailedException in your code. This will only work for servers that follow the SMTP specifications and actually send an error code back. Like I said, very few public servers actually do this.
  2. Set up a proper mailbox for the address you use as sender and monitor that inbox for delivery failed notices. Note thought that these need not follow any common pattern, which is why this is non-trivial.
  3. For the email servers that doesn't give any notice, you really have no way of knowing.

This is one of the reasons why companies buy mass emailing services from dedicated providers, since they have all these things already built to measure bounce-rate etc. But even with those, it's never going to be 100% accurate.

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