Package edu.uiuc.ncsa.security.servlet.mail

This package is used for adding email notification support to Tomcat servlets. Since Tomcat has a global facility for sending email, it is necessary to utilize that rather than just rolling our own (or there will be runtime issues). This is a wrapper for Java Mail.

Configuring Tomcat

  • You must download a copy of the JavaMail jar and drop it into the $CATALINA_HOME/lib directory.
  • You must add the following line to $CATALINA_HOME/context.xml 
    <Resource name="mail/Session" type="javax.mail.Session" auth="Container"/>
    Optionally, you made add the switch mail.debug="true" to this if you want to see lots of information about sending messages in the log file. You can also just put this switch in your properties file too (no quotes).
  • You must edit and setup your template files. This ensures that you have the ability to get the right message as needed.
  • Finally, in your deployment descriptor ("web.xml") file you must add the following section (right before the final closing tag is fine): 
       <resource-ref>
        <description>
            Resource reference to a factory for javax.mail.Session
            instances that may be used for sending electronic mail
            messages, preconfigured to connect to the appropriate
            SMTP server.
        </description>
        <res-ref-name>mail/Session</res-ref-name>
        <res-type>javax.mail.Session</res-type>
        <res-auth>Container</res-auth>
   </resource-ref>

One issue is that Tomcat uses multiple class loaders, so that if you include Java Mail in your webapp you will ge very strange ClassCastExceptions, e.g. javax.mail.Session cannot be cast to javax.mail.Session
This is because classes themselves exist as objects different class loaders have different instances of them, hence they are not identical so cannot be cast to each other. Rather than have a massive kludge to let you add the mail jar to your webapp, we'll require that you use Tomcat's system for this.