email sending service

Hi,

I'm developing a service to send and receive emails for my company.

Basically, I configure an email account from which it will download emails, and an smtp account which it will use for sending the emails.

I'm using javamail 1.4.3.

At the moment we are using the EML format to deal with the files.

For example, when downloading an email, we save it locally as an EML file so our other applications can read it and deal with it as they need to.

Also, when one of our other applications need to send an email, they have to create an EML file with the content they want to send, and save it in one specific local folder so our email sending service can read the EML file and then send it.

My question is the following:

Is that really the better approach?

I think it's kind of complicated to our other application to have to deal with EML files. To do this they must use the javamail API too, which I was thinking should only be used by our email sending service.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.