Richard O. Hammer wrote:
Three months ago in November we exchanged a few ideas about how the
JavaMail API might be made more useful for development of mail servers
-- as distinct from development of mail clients. Now I have discovered
one more point that I would like to add. I might be mistaken again
because of my incomplete understanding of the API, but I hope this is
right. My comment concerns javax.mail.internet.InternetHeaders.
When a SMTP server receives a message it needs to add a Received: header
at the top of the headers. But InternetHeaders does not seem to offer
any way to add a header specifically at the top of the list. This class
seems to offer no way for its users to learn or set the order of the
headers. (I am referencing the JavaDocs for JavaMail 1.3).
As a consequence the code in James* goes through an awkward workaround:
constructing a new InternetHeaders object, adding the new Received:
header, and then adding the remaining header lines by looping through an
Enumeration of header lines retrieved from the original incoming
InternetHeaders object. This workaround relies upon behavior which I
have not seen documented, namely that the addHeaderLine() method always
adds to the bottom of the list of headers.
So, I would suggest that InternetHeaders could be improved, for the use
of server developers, by addition of a method addHeaderLineAtTop(), and
by promising and documenting the present behavior of addHeaderLine(),
that it adds to the bottom.
It's something of a kludge, but InternetHeaders already handles this in
the addHeaders method. It knows the preferred order for well-known
headers, and it knows that Received headers should be added in reverse
order. The addHeaderLine method, on the other hand, always adds to the
end. I suppose some part of that ought to be part of the spec. :-)
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