JMail is a cross-platform POP3 and SMTP mail client. This application is designed to run without modification on any architecture that supports and has installed the Java 2 runtime environment. It is likewise intended to adhere to applicable IEEE standards as defined by the relevant IETF Request For Comment documents, available at www.ietf.org Applicable standards are defined in RFC numbers 2821, 2822, and 1939. The application will be executable both from the command line and in a windowed form in a graphical user interface.

  Development took place over the courcse of the a year. The application is writen in java because of the rich set of predefined GUI components and I/O classes already in existence in the core Java API. This allowed development to focus primarily on the necessary protocols for mail transfer. SMTP Transit was implemented first, then POP3 Transit (see references above for full descriptions of each protocol). SMTP support for binary attachments was the final step in development, and the most difficult. The application does not include a mail viewer or parser.

  Testing took place on a variety of machines under a variety of Operating Systems. SMTP and POP3 transfer are known to function properly on Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Redhat Linux 9, Fedora Linux 1, and Lackware Linux 9. Some earlier versions of the command-line clients were tested on Macintosh OS X.

  Completion of this project has greatly furthered my understanding of high-level communication protocols and the implementation and limitations of the Java programming language. The most enlightening part of the project was learning how to add support for binary attachments. This feature stepped into areas of programmig where Java's very high-level, very object-oriented approach caused some minor implementation issues.