How to access shared mailboxes using JavaMail

[Anky Pop]

We have few mail boxes (on Microsoft Exchange server 5.5) which do not have specific domain user name and password. Specific users are given restricted access to these mailboxes.

In MS Outlook, users can see these mailboxes by adding them as Additional mail boxes to their mail profile through advanced settings.

We are designing an application which reads mails from these mailboxes. Since the mailbox has no password associated with it, we need to use the authentication of specific users who have been given access.

We tried methods in the class com.sun.mail.imap.IMAPStore to access Shared, Personal and User namespaces. The public folders can be accessed through shared namespaces. But none of these methods were able to access these additional mail boxes that we added.

I believe there should be some workaround to access such mailboxes.

Can anyone tell me how to get this issue resolved ?

Appreciate any help in this regard.

Thanks,
Anky

[Ulf Dittmer]

Welcome to JavaRanch.

I'm not sure the issue can be resolved. This sounds like something that's specific to Exchange, which a general-purpose API like JavaMail wouldn't know anything about. You may have to use an Exchange-specific Java library for doing this; most likely you'll have to pay for that.

[Anky Pop]

Thanks Ulf.

That's disappointing. So i am thinking the only this can be done is by asking my networking fellas to create a login id / password for these accounts and then maybe logging in using that. But i thought using IMAP i could get all the mailboxes in the shared namespace !! Then this is nothing better than POP where i can access only my mailbox ?

Anky

[Ulf Dittmer]

If Exchange was nothing more than a POP/IMAP server, then it would be possible to use all its features with any standard mail client. But it's much more than that, and the Outlook client uses additional protocols beyond the standard mail protocols to communicate with Exchange.