Search email inbox using javax.mail

Question

I was trying to see if there was a way to search an email inbox from javax.mail. Say I wanted to send a query and have the it return emails to us. Can we parse returned HTML and extract data. Also, if the above is possible how would I "translate" those messages returned by that server to POP3 messages? E.g. we have extracted:

Subject: Foo
Body: Bar

but to open same message using POP3 I need to know it's POP3 uid, or number. I don't think we'll be able to get UID but perhaps we can figure out the number.

I guess the question is:

Can I send a query to email server (such as Hotmail or Yahoo) and get returned emails?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, the POP3 protocol doesn't support that. It is not like SQL or so. You need to mirror the complete mailbox yourself in some kind of a datastore (SQL database?) and execute the search on that. You can eventually keep/cache the data so that you don't need to retrieve the whole inbox everytime, but only the unread items.