This section describes the Email agent, which can connect to an existing email server using either the IMAP or POP3 protocols and fetch from emails from them. This is a collection agent for batch workflow configurations.

This agent implements Jakarta Mail.

Workflow with Email agent

Batch model

To make sure that every email gets handled according to the rules set in the configuration we treat each email as a batch. Meaning that if the mail folder where you read the emails from, contains 30 emails that you will process, it will be split into 30 batches. 

To manage resources better the agent splits a large number of messages into batches internally. Instead of lazy loading each message during processing, which would mean more than one transaction to the email server per message, the agent fetches all content for the specified number of emails at a time and then processes them. 

Pseudocode of batch model

The section contains the following subsections: