About the Ultra Search Java Email API

Email documents contain valuable information but are not structured to find specific relevant information easily. Oracle Ultra Search enables you to retrieve and index emails residing on a server that supports the IMAP4 protocol.

To facilitate this feature, Ultra Search defines the concept of an email source. An email source is a data source which derives its content from emails sent to a specific email address. When the Ultra Search Crawler crawls an email source, the crawler collects all emails that have the specific email address in any of the "To:" or "Cc:" email header fields. Note that Ultra Search stores copies of all retrieved emails in the local file system of the Ultra Search Server Installation.

A possible application of an email source is where an email source represents all emails sent to a mailing list. In such a scenario, multiple email sources will be defined where each email source represents an email list.

Ultra Search email crawling and rendering is built on top of the JavaMail API. This enables Ultra Search to provide a Java API for accessing indexed emails. The API is known as the Oracle Ultra Search Java Email API. This API enables you to retrieve information such as email header information, email body content, and attachments of an email.

You can use this API to embed Ultra Search email browsing functionality into Java Server Page (JSP) or Servlet-based web applications. Ultra Search ships a fully functional JSP web application that directly uses this API to render indexed emails. Since the source code is viewable, you can use it as an example for building your own customized email browser.

JavaMail implementation

Ultra Search email crawling and rendering is built on top of the JavaMail™ API using Sun Microsystems' reference implementation of JavaMail™. Ultra Search requires a JavaMail™ 1.1 compliant implementation. The reference implementation by Sun Microsystems is JavaMail version 1.1.3. This reference implementation is shipped with Ultra Search.

Java Email API

The Ultra Search Java Email API is encapsulated in the oracle.context.isearch.query.MailTool class.