As I near completion of assignment 4, I think I've progressed enough to be able to adequately reflect upon it. I have to admit I found the project a little daunting in the beginning. The scope of it seemed to be more than I could handle in the time I had left to complete the course, given my other courses theis semester and the work I had yet to complete on assignments 2 and 3. Setting up JavaMail on my machine and taking a first glance at the Learning Object caused some concern. Once I got past that, however, I started to enjoy playing around with the topics. This assignment was definitely the easiest topic to find tutorials for - there are plenty of good ones to use, both text and video format. In my experience, the videos provided a sense of how the semantics flow, and the text tutorials provided excellent base examples on which to build. The first 2 programs were finsihed nearly simultaneously - once you get the firsrt one working properly, it's a matter of tweaking for attachment functionality for the second requirement, using a couple of additional classes.

The third requirement may present some challenges that have less to do with the code than with understanding the network environment, and I found this to be the biggest challenge of the assignment. Persistence will pay of here, though.

Overall, the satisfaction of seeing your code working in a real-world situation might be the best thing about this assignment. That feeling is exactly why I was intersted in learning to write code in the first place; building something out of nothing (or more accurately taking something and molding it to suit your needs), and then seeing work properly in action, is fantastic.