this example is based on a task that we worked on half a year ago for our online message box. At eBay Kleinanzeigen buyers and sellers used to communicate via E-Mail through our platform.
We introduced a new feature called message box to allow people a quicker and less formal way of communication. Message box can be used transparently over different channels (a user of messagebox might be communicating with a user that still uses e-mails).
One of the biggest challenge we had, was to cope with the e-mail format in order to extract the actual contents of a mail from our template text in the first mail and all the quotation mess that mail clients produce.
This is a complicated task and we know that you're not going to finish it in time. Also, we have not found a perfect solution. We want to see your approach and considerations as well as your style of work. (and maybe learn from your ideas ;) )
For this task you can assume that:
- you can use any libraries you want (pom.xml)
- we only cope with plaintext mails (no html content e-mails)
- conversations will always be a ping pong: message from A -> message from B -> message from A. (not something like Message from A -> message from A -> message from B)
- you will have to handle all weird sorts of quotation styles that mail clients may or may not use.
- users may mix their replies with the quoted parts (meaning they reply individually to each paragraph)
- This project is configured for Java 7 as default - but you may change this to Java 8 if you like.