Sending an OWA logon form from Java

Question

I am interested in a way to programmatically log into OWA (Microsoft Outlook Web Access - a web-based email client) from Java code and retrieve nothing more than the inbox u

Answer 1

That JavaScript does certainly an important thing: it adds a cookie to the document. A decent HTTP client is required to send all valid cookies along the headers on every HTTP request. You should do the same programmatically. You can add headers using URLConnection#setRequestProperty().

Further, there are several things to take into account as well when submitting forms programmatically: you should not skip any hidden input fields (input type="hidden"), those might be of relevance. You should also send the name=value pair of the submit button you'd like to press programmatically along as request parameter. Finally, you should not be using & to concatenate parameter pairs, but &.

Note that I don't guarantee that it will finally work, that OWA thing might have some other prevention against bots, but it should solve the as far spotted problems.

See also:

• How to use URLConnection?

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By the way, have you considered just connecting it using a SMTP/IMAP API like JavaMail?

Answer 2

Why go through a form? MS recently open sourced a Java client for their Exchange server API.

http://blogs.office.com/2014/08/28/open-sourcing-exchange-web-services-ews-java-api/

https://github.com/OfficeDev/ews-java-api