Sun's posted the first public draft of the JavaMail 1.4 specification. JavaMail is a basic library for performing POP, SMTP, and IMAP. I wrote about this in the final chapter of Java Network Programming. So far, this is just a description of the changes since JavaMail 1.3, which are mostly some convenience methods and properties. The focus seems to be on improved MIME support, non-ASCII data, mail account quotas, and shared input streams (an interesting idea.) Nothing seems backwards incompatible in any way, and existing code should still work. This release of the API will require Java 1.4 or later. Earlier versions will no longer be supported.