running background process

I want to send email from my application. I need to only start the process of sending and return the control. Typically I will call the send mail method from a servlet. So after calling the method, I want to return back to the servlet and continue with rest of the processing.
Any ideas on how to implement this.. Will Thread.setDaemon be useful here..\

you can use the message driven to implement such function.

If you want to call another thread from servlet, it makes sense for servlet not to wait and return from doPost ( or doGet ) method. The idea of the background processing in servlet is to allow servlet code to return while the background thread will continue. Jason Hunter book on "Java Servlet Programming" has a very good example on servlet background processing which you can use as example.

Doesn't the Servlet API spec prohibit starting Threads? Not that I imagine it would cause much harm...

Been a while since I looked at the specs. A quick flash through the 2.2 specs (old I know) gives ......
Threads are not prohibited.
Specs say: do not pass references to certain objects (request / response ) to other threads.
Specs say: the container must ensure thread continuity across dispatch.
Guy

Looking at the 2.4 specs: both of the above 'requirements' are now 'recommendations'.
G.