Getting n most recent emails using IMAP and Python

Question

I\'m looking to return the n (most likely 10) most recent emails from an email accounts inbox using IMAP.

So far I\'ve cobbled together:

import imapl         


        

Answer 1

# get recent one email
from imap_tools import MailBox
with MailBox('imap.mail.com').login('test@mail.com', 'password', 'INBOX') as mailbox:
   for message in mailbox.fetch(limit=1, reverse=True):
       print(msg.date_str, msg.subject)

https://github.com/ikvk/imap_tools

Answer 2

The sort command is available, but it is not guaranteed to be supported by the IMAP server. For example, Gmail does not support the SORT command.

To try the sort command, you would replace:
M.search(None, 'ALL')
with
M.sort(search_critera, 'UTF-8', 'ALL')

Then search_criteria would be a string like:

search_criteria = 'DATE' #Ascending, most recent email last
search_criteria = 'REVERSE DATE' #Descending, most recent email first

search_criteria = '[REVERSE] sort-key' #format for sorting

According to RFC5256 these are valid sort-key's:
"ARRIVAL" / "CC" / "DATE" / "FROM" / "SIZE" / "SUBJECT" / "TO"

Notes:
1. charset is required, try US-ASCII or UTF-8 all others are not required to be supported by the IMAP server
2. search critera is also required. The ALL command is a valid one, but there are many. See more at http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/rfc/rfc3501.txt

The world of IMAP is wild and crazy. Good luck

Answer 3

Workaround for Gmail. Since the The IMAP.sort('DATE','UTF-8','ALL') does not work for gmail ,we can insert the values and date into a list and sort the list in reverse order of date. Can check for the first n-mails using a counter. This method will take a few minutes longer if there are hundreds of mails.

    M.login(user,password)
    rv,data= M.search(None,'ALL')
    if rv=='OK':
        msg_list=[]
        for num in date[0].split():
            rv,data=M.fetch(num,'(RFC822)')
            if rv=='OK':
                msg_object={}
                msg_object_copy={}
                msg=email.message_from_bytes(data[0][1])
                msg_date=""
                for val in msg['Date'].split(' '):
                    if(len(val)==1):
                        val="0"+val
                    # to pad the single date with 0
                    msg_date=msg_date+val+" "
                msg_date=msg_date[:-1]
              # to remove the last space
                msg_object['date']= datetime.datetime.strptime(msg_date,"%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z")
            # to convert string to date time object for sorting the list
                msg_object['msg']=msg
                msg_object_copy=msg_object.copy()
                msg_list.append(msg_object_copy)
        msg_list.sort(reverse=True,key=lambda r:r['date'])
# sorts by datetime so latest mails are parsed first
        count=0
        for msg_obj in msg_list:
            count=count+1
            if count==n:
                break
            msg=msg_obj['msg']
        # do things with the message

Answer 4

This is the code to get the emailFrom, emailSubject, emailDate, emailContent etc..

import imaplib, email, os
user = "your@email.com"
password = "pass"
imap_url = "imap.gmail.com"
connection = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(imap_url)
connection.login(user, password)
result, data = connection.uid('search', None, "ALL")
if result == 'OK':
    for num in data[0].split():
        result, data = connection.uid('fetch', num, '(RFC822)')
        if result == 'OK':
            email_message = email.message_from_bytes(data[0][1])
            print('From:' + email_message['From'])
            print('To:' + email_message['To'])
            print('Date:' + email_message['Date'])
            print('Subject:' + str(email_message['Subject']))
            print('Content:' + str(email_message.get_payload()[0]))
connection.close()
connection.logout()        

Answer 5

this is work for me~

import imaplib
from email.parser import HeaderParser
M = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('my.server')
user = 'username'
password = 'password'
M.login(user, password)
(retcode, messages) =M.search(None, 'ALL')
 news_mail = get_mostnew_email(messages)
for i in news_mail :
    data = M.fetch(i, '(BODY[HEADER])')
    header_data = data[1][0][1]
    parser = HeaderParser()
    msg = parser.parsestr(header_data)
    print msg['subject']

and this is get the newer email function :

def get_mostnew_email(messages):
    """
    Getting in most recent emails using IMAP and Python
    :param messages:
    :return:
    """
    ids = messages[0]  # data is a list.
    id_list = ids.split()  # ids is a space separated string
    #latest_ten_email_id = id_list  # get all
    latest_ten_email_id = id_list[-10:]  # get the latest 10
    keys = map(int, latest_ten_email_id)
    news_keys = sorted(keys, reverse=True)
    str_keys = [str(e) for e in news_keys]
    return  str_keys