Introduction to the Sun Internet Mail SDK |
Sun Internet Mail SDK is an add-on package to Sun Internet Mail - Enterprise version.The goal of Sun Internet Mail SDK is to allow programmers to extend the feature set offered by SIMS, and to simply create interfaces between SIMS and a site-specific mail environment. The most obvious examples of useful programs that can be written using Sun Internet Mail SDK include:
mail gateways mail user agents mail auto-responders
mail processing programs such as anti-virus checkers, document converters, etc... any combination of the above examples.
The cornerstone of the SIMS IMTA architecture is the channel. Each channel object comprises of three things:
- a message queue which holds the messages as they transit through the IMTA,
- an optional slave program, which receives messages from an external source and enqueues them, that is, stores them in the message queue. Once enqueued, messages are processed, transmitted and/or delivered by the the SIMS IMTA.
- an optional master program, which extracts messages from message queue and disposes of them according to the nature of the channel.
The Sun Internet Mail SDK gives programmers the ability to create master and slave channel programs, i.e. programs which enqueue (submit) messages to the SIMS IMTA message queues, or dequeue (retrieve) messages from the SIMS IMTA message queues.
The Sun Internet Mail SDK can be installed by the SIMS installation tools.
The functionality provided by the Sun Internet Mail SDK consists of 5 APIs (application programming interfaces):
TABLE 1 API Summary API
Description
To enqueue messages to a channel's queue. To dequeue messages from channel's queue Support for message header creation annd parsing Support for RFC 822 compliant address parsing and checking miscellaneous routines to support other APIs
Programmers should be familiar with the high-level architecture of the SIMS IMTA and its configuration files, as described in the SIMS Reference Guide.It is highly recommended that programmers writing software that create e-mail messages have a working knowledge of the standards defining Internet message structures. For your convenience, the related Internet RFCs are include in the Sun Internet Mail SDK documentation.