Email is not dead, is not even a zombie. If something is well alive and working in all areas I can think of; given that, many of not all applications have to know how to (at least) send mails properly to all the different SMTP servers and providers there are.
Now in my current job we deal mainly with Java-based projects in which JavaMail is the major, sometimes we deal with legacy systems with old implementations, sometimes we deal with new projects that have to communicate to old SMTP servers.
In either case, the problem is how to do it, how to ensure that a mail is sent once the application you are working on is ready and running.
Among the many approaches we've tried there are mainly two issues than come from time to time:
- How do I communicate with this particular SMTP server?
- What's the best way to implement this functionality in my application?
Both questions can be easily answered now with little effort, but in some cases we have to dig deeper. This is my approach to answer these questions:
- How do I communicate with this particular SMTP server?
- Use tools, check with telnet, use a command-line application like mailsender (I wrote it ;-)) to see which setup works with your SMTP server.
- Use a local and simple SMTP server to test with, something like MailCatcher.
- What's the best way to implement this functionality in my application?
- Take what is working, no matter how old it is, it's being tested and used in many environments and works as customers expect it.
