Thread: JavaMail - How do I get a specific Header of an Email?

Hi to All,
I'm trying to extract the Message-ID from an Email and I found this code online which gives me the entire header information:

package bgmailproc;
import java.util.*;
import javax.mail.*;
 
public class msgshow {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        Properties props = System.getProperties();
        props.setProperty("mail.pop3.port", "995");
        Session session = Session.getInstance(props, null);
        Store store = session.getStore("imaps");
 
        store.connect("pop.gmail.com", "myusername", "mypassword");
        Folder inbox = store.getFolder("INBOX");
        inbox.open(Folder.READ_ONLY);
        //System.out.print(inbox.getMessageCount());
 
 
        for (int i = 1;i <= 10; i++){
 
 
            System.out.println(h.getName() + ": " + h.getValue());
            inbox.getMessage(i).getHeader("Message-Id");
 
            Enumeration headers = inbox.getMessage(i).getAllHeaders();
 
            while (headers.hasMoreElements()) {
                Header h = (Header) headers.nextElement();
                System.out.println(h.getName() + ":" + h.getValue());
            }
        }
        inbox.close(true);
    }
}

Question: How do I get a specific Header of an Email? I tried using this code:
System.out.println(inbox.getMessage(i).getHeader(" Message-ID"));

But this gives me an output of:
[Ljava.lang.String;@1b26af3
[Ljava.lang.String;@8b819f
[Ljava.lang.String;@eb017e
[Ljava.lang.String;@120a47e
[Ljava.lang.String;@f73c1
[Ljava.lang.String;@789144
[Ljava.lang.String;@1893efe
[Ljava.lang.String;@186c6b2
[Ljava.lang.String;@15ee671
[Ljava.lang.String;@16b13c7

Hope you can help me.
Thanks in advance.

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

Your solution really worked. But, is there a way to prevent looping through all of then elements of Header?
I'm looking at using getHeader() function.

inbox.getMessage(i).getHeader("Message-Id");

Hi,

I figured it out how to do it.

MimeMessage m = (MimeMessage) inbox.getMessage(i);
System.out.println(m.getMessageID());

Though using code disregards Message-ID "X-TM-IMSS-Message-ID", it's fine and just what I need.

Thanks once again.

Originally Posted by JavaPF

Hello gsanchezbiz,

Welcome to the Java Programming Forums.
Sorry for the late reply on this. I have compiled the code and it seems to work.

Just to clarify, you are looking to extract all of the Message-ID's? For example:

Message-ID:<CC3DADE7B22D134FB3F84E34B91F84800143A420@dghdc 001.dghmoney.local>

I've had a play around with it and you should be able to do something like this:

import java.util.*;
import javax.mail.*;
 
public class msgshow {
 
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        Properties props = System.getProperties();
        props.setProperty("mail.pop3.port", "995");
        Session session = Session.getInstance(props, null);
        Store store = session.getStore("imaps");
 
        store.connect("pop.gmail.com", "username", "password");
        Folder inbox = store.getFolder("INBOX");
        inbox.open(Folder.READ_ONLY);
        //System.out.print(inbox.getMessageCount()); 
 
        for (int i = 1;i <= 10; i++){
 
             //System.out.println(h.getName() + ": " + h.getValue());
 
        	inbox.getMessage(i).getHeader("Message-Id"); 
            Enumeration headers = inbox.getMessage(i).getAllHeaders();
 
            while (headers.hasMoreElements()) {
                Header h = (Header) headers.nextElement();
                //System.out.println(h.getName() + ":" + h.getValue());
                //System.out.println("");                
                String mID = h.getName();                
                if(mID.contains("Message-ID")){
                	System.out.println(h.getName() + ":" + h.getValue());
                }
            }
        }
        inbox.close(true);
    }
}

Thank you very much for this code, this is exactly what I was looking for... Although, for some reason there were a couple of emails where it couldn't find the Message-ID header even though I manually found it on those .eml files. After playing a bit with it, I noticed that for those emails it detected the header as Message-Id and I have no idea why, because on the file it has a capital D... So I just modified the line like this: if(mID.contains("Message-ID") || mID.contains("Message-Id"))