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Message-ID: <4D3D578E.5050607@secu.lu>
Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2011 11:42:22 +0100
From: Noss Benoit <benoit.noss@secu.lu>
Organization: CISS
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To: mime4j-dev@james.apache.org
Subject: Re: Headless mail renderer
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Hi Stefano,
thanks for your answer. In the past, I already tried to do this with the 
javax.mail.Message class.
it was not a big success..., and found lots of issues due to the variety 
of incoming mails, so couldn't get in production.
With each parsed Message, I tried to build in parallel a xhtml page 
representing its content (From: To: Subject: Date: and body content)
When the attachement was a message, I recursively went into it and 
appended info found in the xhtml I previously created
When I found html, I tried to transform it to XHTML with tidy, then to 
PDF with iText
                                     when XHTML transformation failed 
and had a multipart/alternative, I then rendered txt to PDF
When I found attached images, I rendered them to PDF
When I found office documents I didn't transform them
After that I merged all created PDF in one big PDF and checked it in to 
Documentum DB (for one message, one pdf)

The aim of the project is not to have a pretty rendering of all mail, 
it's just to keep track of messages our client sent.

I faced three big issues :
**************************
0/ multipart/mixed with inline image content in "cid:...."
1/ like you said html to pdf rendering is difficult and (tidy+iText or 
multipart/alternative) was not always working.
     If only I could use the Mozilla components to render it, but my 
understanding of it is not high enough
2/ Special caracters and encoding pb in headers and attached file names

Beno�t.

On 24.01.2011 09:34, Stefano Bagnara wrote:
> 2011/1/24 Noss Benoit<benoit.noss@secu.lu>:
>> I don't want to spam you with this question, but I would like to make an
>> headless PDF mail renderer.
>> In my project, I want to batch process incoming mails and inject them in a
>> content management DB as PDF.
>> Am I on the right way if I use your MimeStreamParser combined with a custom
>> handler to make rendering?
>> Can I access the content? Do you suggest something else for this?
> You can use mime4j but you will have to manually deal with
> attachments, multiparts/alternative to decide what part to render,
> multipart/mixed to get inline images streams to be placed in the html.
> And how do you plan to do headless html to pdf rendering? I think this
> is the difficult task. Parsing with mime4j is easy: just look at some
> example.
>
> Stefano