How to differentiate between the automatic reply and the normal mail received

I am working on receiving mails in my springboot application. In order to fetch and store the receive mails. I am using imap mail listener. There are two types of mails which I am storing. One is multipart payload type and the other is string payload type.

After receiving mail I am trying to send an auto-generated mails using java mail. The issue which I am facing is worst case scenario of generating auto-reply from my application i.e infinite loop.

Can someone help ow can I differentiate between a normal mail received and auto-reply received in my mail box and generate auto-replies from my system only for those mails which are not auto-reply type.

It would be nice if explained via code for headers check. I came across through few headers like x-Autosubmitted. But they are returning null if I am trying to print the values in console.

Solution

The auto-submmitted markers are described below that you may find helpful:

auto-generated - Indicates that a message was generated by an automatic process, and is not a direct response to another message.
auto-replied - Indicates that a message was automatically generated as a direct response to another message.
auto-notified - Indicates that a message was generated by a Sieve notification system.
no - Indicates that a message was NOT automatically generated, but was created by a human. It is the equivalent to the absence of an Auto-Submitted header altogether.

The RFC 2822 states the following:

Though optional, every message SHOULD have a "Message-ID:" field.
Furthermore, reply messages SHOULD have "In-Reply-To:"

So, you may check for the "In-Reply-To:" value in the header.

Also you may add your own value to the outgoing email, so you may distinguish between an automatically generated reply from your system and manually created.