Parsing IMAP responses in python

Question

I am using imaplib to work with imap in python, however it looks like it doesn't have means to parse the details of IMAP responses. For example, query like:

   msgdata = connection.fetch(num, "(BODY.PEEK[HEADER.FIELDS (FROM TO CC DATE SUBJECT MESSAGE-ID)] UID)")

where num is the message number, for one mail server may produce (for example):

  ('OK', [('1234 (BODY[HEADER.FIELDS (FROM TO CC DATE SUBJECT MESSAGE-ID)] {123}', 'From: ...etc headers'), ' UID 3456)'])

and for another:

  ('OK', [('1234 (UID 3456 BODY[HEADER.FIELDS (FROM TO CC DATE SUBJECT MESSAGE-ID)] {123}', 'From: ...etc headers'), ')'])

As you see, the message details are different and UID is even in different element there. So the question is - is there some library that would allow to automatically sort it out and abstract the details of what particular mail server does?

Answer 1

Doug Hellman's Python Module of the Week entry for imaplib is a fairly extensive tutorial on the subject, but is far to long to reproduce here.

You might want to use a higher level library like IMAPClient to hide some of the details of the IMAP protocol.

Answer 2

High level IMAP lib may be useful: https://github.com/ikvk/imap_tools

from imap_tools import MailBox
# get list of email subjects from INBOX folder
with MailBox('imap.mail.com').login('[email protected]', 'password', 'INBOX') as mailbox:
    data = [(msg.uid, msg.subject) for msg in mailbox.fetch()]

Answer 3

Look at Imbox, you will probably find what your are looking for https://pypi.org/project/imbox/