Extract attachments from Emails

Extract attachments from Emails

To extract attachments from emails getContainer method is used. This method returns the collection of ContainerItem objects.

Email Attachment can contain the following metadata:

NameDescription
content-typeThe MIME type of the attachment content

These metadata refer to a container element itself, not a document.

Here are the steps to extract an email text from email attachments:

  • Instantiate Parser object for the initial document;
  • Call getContainer method and obtain collection of ContainerItem objects;
  • Check if collection isn’t null (container extraction is supported for the document);
  • Iterate through the collection and obtain Parser object to extract a text.

The following example shows how to extract a text from email attachments:

// Create an instance of Parser class
try (Parser parser = new Parser(Constants.SampleMsg)) {
    // Extract attachments from the container
    Iterable<ContainerItem> attachments = parser.getContainer();
    // Check if container extraction is supported
    if (attachments == null) {
        System.out.println("Container extraction isn't supported");
    }
    // Iterate over zip entities
    for (ContainerItem item : attachments) {
        // Print the file path
        System.out.println(item.getFilePath());
        // Print metadata
        for (MetadataItem metadata : item.getMetadata()) {
            System.out.println(String.format("%s: %s", metadata.getName(), metadata.getValue()));
        }
        try {
            // Create Parser object for the zip entity content
            try (Parser attachmentParser = item.openParser()) {
                // Extract an zip entity text
                try (TextReader reader = attachmentParser.getText()) {
                    System.out.println(reader == null ? "No text" : reader.readToEnd());
                }
            }
        } catch (UnsupportedDocumentFormatException ex) {
            System.out.println("Isn't supported.");
        }
    }
}

More resources

GitHub examples

You may easily run the code above and see the feature in action in our GitHub examples:

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