An important feature of the mailet container is the ability to fork processing of messages. When a message first arrives at the server, it might have multiple recipients specified. As a message is passed to a matcher, the matcher might only "match" one of the listed recipients. It would then return only the matching recipient in the Collection. The mailet container should then duplicate the message splitting the recipient list across the two messages as per what the matcher returned.
[THIS PARAGRAPH NOT YET IMPLEMENTED] The matcher can extend this forking to further separation by returning a Collection of Collection objects. This allows a matcher to fork multiple processes if there are multiple recipients that require separate processing. For example, we could write a ListservMatcher that handles multiple listservs. When someone cross-posts across multiple listservs that this matcher handles, it could put each listserv address (recipient) that it handles in a separate Collection object. By returning each of these Collections within a container Collection object, it could indicate to the mailet container how many forks to spawn.
This interface defines methods to initialize a matcher, to match messages, and to remove a matcher from the server. These are known as life-cycle methods and are called in the following sequence:
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