Does the IMAP provider cache the retrieved data?
The IMAP provider fetches the data for a message from the server only when necessary. (The javax.mail.FetchProfile can be used to optimize this). The header and bodystructure information, once fetched, is always cached within the Message object. However, the content of a bodypart is not cached. So each time the content is requested by the client (either using getContent() or using getInputStream()), a new FETCH request is issued to the server. The reason for this is that the content of a message could be potentially large, and if we cache this content for a large number of messages, there is the possibility that the system may run out of memory soon since the garbage collector cannot free the referenced objects. Clients should be aware of this and must hold on to the retrieved content themselves if needed.
