Hibernate transaction manager configurations in Spring

The reason Hibernate does not perform any SQL queries until you call the getters is because I believe the FetchType is set to LAZY. To fix this problem you will need to change the FetchType to EAGER in your POJO:

@Entity
@Table(name = "user")
public class User {

    /*Other data members*/

    @Basic(fetch = FetchType.EAGER)
    private String email;

}

I personally never had to specify Basic types to have an EAGER FetchType so I'm not entirely sure why your configuration requires this. If its only in your tests it could be due to the way you have your JUnit tests configured. It should have something like this on the class declaration:

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@ContextConfiguration({"/test-app-config.xml"})
@Transactional
public class UserServiceTest {

}

As for a good resource I always find SpringByExample to be helpful.

EDIT

So I'm not entirely sure what is wrong with your configuration. It does differ from the way I have mine set up so here is my typical configuration in hopes that it helps. The hibernate.transaction.factory_class could be a key property you are missing. I also use the AnnotationSessionFactoryBean:

<!-- DataSource -->
<bean id="dataSource" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource" destroy-method="close"
    p:driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" 
    p:url="jdbc:mysql://localhost/dbname"
    p:username="root"
    p:password="password"/>

<!-- Hibernate session factory -->
<bean id="sessionFactory"
    class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean"
    p:dataSource-ref="dataSource">
    <property name="packagesToScan" value="com.beans"/>
    <property name="hibernateProperties">
        <props>
            <prop key="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.show_sql">true</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.transaction.factory_class">org.hibernate.transaction.JDBCTransactionFactory</prop>
        </props>
    </property>
</bean> 

<!-- Transaction Manager -->
<bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateTransactionManager">
    <property name="sessionFactory">
        <ref bean="sessionFactory" />
    </property>
</bean>

<tx:annotation-driven transaction-manager="transactionManager"/>

Ok, finally i realized what was the problem. In code above i used load instead of get. Session.load did not actually hit the databased. That's the reason why i get lazy-initialization exception outside of @Transactional method

If i use openSession instead of getCurrentSession, session is opened outside of scope spring container. As result session was not close and it allow me to read object properties outside of @Transactional method