Find Gmail url-IDs via IMAP

Question

One of my favourite features of Gmail is the ability to bookmark urls to certain messages like this:

https://mail.google.com/mail/#all/124c8f386d41fd3a

What I would like to do is write a script that accesses my Gmail account via IMAP and creates an HTML page with links like the above to each message I am interested in.

However, it seems there is no way to find the "124c8f386d41fd3a" ID from the IMAP envelope or UUID properties. All the message-ids and uuids I am finding are of a different format and can't be used to produce valid links to my inbox.

Does anybody know how to find those url-IDs in IMAP?

-- Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined

PS: I am using Ruby and my previous attempts included:

imap.fetch(message_id, "UID") imap.fetch(message_id, "ENVELOPE") imap.fetch(message_id, ...) 

I tried all properties listed for FetchData in the ruby imap docs

Answer 1

Gmail provides an attribute: X-GM-THRID for thread id.

You can use imap fetch function for getting the thread id.

Also see the documentation here.

Answer 2

Found something. May be someone need. I don't know how to use ruby, I want use php, but don't know how to extend standart imap functions in php.

openssl s_client -crlf -connect imap.gmail.com:993 . login username password . select inbox . FETCH 1 (X-GM-THRID) 

you'll get something like this * 1 FETCH (X-GM-THRID 1327644190303473294) next you need to convert it from decimal to hexadecimal value:

<?php echo dechex(1327644190303473294); ?> //return 126cbd5b5f264e8e