Search email inbox using javax.mail

I was trying to see if there was a way to search an email inbox from javax.mail. Say I wanted to send a query and have the it return emails to us. Can we parse returned HTML and extract data. Also, if the above is possible how would I "translate" those messages returned by that server to POP3 messages? E.g. we have extracted:

Subject: Foo
Bod开发者_如何学运维y: Bar

but to open same message using POP3 I need to know it's POP3 uid, or number. I don't think we'll be able to get UID but perhaps we can figure out the number.

I guess the question is:

Can I send a query to email server (such as Hotmail or Yahoo) and get returned emails?

Unfortunately, the POP3 protocol doesn't support that. It is not like SQL or so. You need to mirror the complete mailbox yourself in some kind of a datastore (SQL database?) and execute the search on that. You can eventually keep/cache the data so that you don't need to retrieve the whole inbox everytime, but only the unread items.