Should I use GET or POST for an endpoint passing or returning anything in Spring Boot?

I have a mail sender method in my Spring Boot app and when I defining related endpoint in the Controller, I could not be sure what is the most proper request for that.

As I do not pass any parameter and the method does not return any content, I am not sure POST or GET is suitable for this. So, which request should I use?

>Solution :

Premised that the choice depends on your personal opinion and habit as developer, and on the specific purpose of your application.

However, in your specific case, I would follow the below logic:

  1. Request is about "retrieving" email -> GET method is better
  2. Request is about "sending" email -> PUT method is better

So the logic is the following: as long as I ask the server to only "retrieve" information and I am not going to send any information to the server (i.e: coming from a form), i will always use GET.
On the other hand, when you also need to pass info to the server and it needs to apply some logic/operation, which might also affect some database, in that case the POST method works better.

Hope that answer your questions. Feel free to add more details, I will strive to help you further.

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