Tomcat 5.5.20 and JavaMail Sessions

Lucio Benfante — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 07:40:00 +0100

You’ll find an article in italian on the same topic in my personal blog.

In Tomcat you can define a JNDI Resource for a JavaMail session putting the following code in you Context definition:

<Resource name="mail/Session" auth="Container"
            type="javax.mail.Session"
            mail.smtp.host="localhost"/>

And in you web.xml:

<resource-ref>
  <res-ref-name>mail/Session</res-ref-name>
  <res-type>javax.mail.Session</res-type>
  <res-auth>Container</res-auth>
</resource-ref>

Then you can use it in you code:

Context initCtx = new InitialContext();
Session session =
    (Session) envCtx.lookup("java:comp/env/mail/Session");

Using Tomcat 5.5.20 (and 5.5.17, and 5.5.23…and maybe other versions) the last statement will produce a ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.naming.factory.MailSessionFactory. The cause is obviously that class is missing from the common/lib/naming-factory.jar distributed by Tomcat. I don’t know if it was a (repeated) problem in building Tomcat. Luckly the source code of that class is still present in the source distribution of Tomcat. Simply it isn’t included in the build process if you don’t have the JavaMail and the JavaBeans Activation Framework in the build classpath. So I re-built the naming-factory.jar file and substituted in common/lib.

You can rebuild your own JAR, or download my new naming-factory.jar.

I discovered this problem (bug?) installing LifeRay 4.1.2 using the WAR distribution. On the contrary the LifeRay-Tomcat bundle contains the correct naming-factory.jar yet. The LifeRay error in this case is more obscure. It reports a javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: Name mail is not bound in this Context! Of course the JNDI Resource is correctly configured. This happens because LifeRay try to guess the JNDI name of the resource, that changes for the different application servers. So that exception comes from one of the attempts, and the real problem is lost and hidden. So, if you’ll see a such message, don’t spend time re-re-re-configuring your JNDI resources…but patch Tomcat!

"Tomcat 5.5.20 and JavaMail Sessions" by Leonardo

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:13:04 +0100

Thank you. I use your solution and it resolve. so i now can use tomcat 5.5 for my debug and not only tomcat 6 thank you very mutch

"Tomcat 5.5.20 and JavaMail Sessions" by Salil

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:17:04 +0200

Great effort. Thanks For Demo

"Tomcat 5.5.20 and JavaMail Sessions" by prasanna

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:55:40 +0100

Thanks for the valuable details provided

"Tomcat 5.5.20 and JavaMail Sessions" by Thanks

Fri, 25 May 2007 23:36:59 +0200

I downloaded your jar and it worked

"Tomcat 5.5.20 and JavaMail Sessions" by Ven

Tue, 22 May 2007 17:05:21 +0200

I am using Liferay 4.1.2 but with JBOSS/Tomcat. Can I use this jar.

Thanks

"Tomcat 5.5.20 and JavaMail Sessions" by Lucio Benfante

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 04:32:33 +0200

Hi Solmaz. You’re welcome.

"Tomcat 5.5.20 and JavaMail Sessions" by Solmaz

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 14:08:00 +0200

I used your jar and my problem solved. thank you.

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