Dear Developers, We are a team of researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Currently, we are studying how crowdsourcing can help developers to build a higher quality software.
One of the subjects that we used is Apache Commons Email. From our experiment, we identified a few areas in a particular file "EmailTest.java" that might be proned to NullPointerException being thrown. The following 7 methods are identified as "NullPointerException Prone": 1) testAddToWithEncoding() 2) testAddTo2() 3) testAddCc2() 4) testAddBccWithEncoding() 5) testAddBcc2() 6) testAddReplyToWithEncoding() 7) testAddReplyTo2() All the above methods encompassed a for loop that checks for the length of the object "VALID_EMAILS" in its condition. Our reference from the Stack Overflow community pointed out that a null check to the object of a for loop is preferred to prevent the occurrence of NPE. The Stack Overflow reference to this is at " http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10565323";. We would like to propose an additional change for your kind consideration: 1) Having an extra assertion to check if the object "VALID_EMAILS" is null By having this new assertion, unnecessary NPE can be avoided. We hope that you can consider this and let us know about any thoughts. This will be a tremendous help to us in our continuing research to building a better software and to help the open-source community as a whole. Please do not hesitate to contact me @ fche...@cse.ust.hk if there are any queries. Thanks a lot and have a great week ahead! -- Warmest Regards, Fuxiang
