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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T07:10:40+00:00

i’m trying to access my gmail inbox with java by using socket (not java

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i’m trying to access my gmail inbox with java by using socket (not java mail api).
i succesfully establish the connection but select inbox command is not recognized. here is my code. and the output i get.

    SSLSocketFactory sslsocketfactory = HttpsURLConnection.getDefaultSSLSocketFactory();
    SSLSocket sslsocket = (SSLSocket) sslsocketfactory.createSocket("imap.gmail.com", 993);

    BufferedReader sin = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(sslsocket.getInputStream()));
    PrintWriter output = new PrintWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(sslsocket.getOutputStream()));

String line;
 output.println("A004 LOGIN my-mail-here my-pass-here");
    output.println("A005 SELECT [GMAIL]/myinbox");
    output.println("A006 LOGOUT");
    output.flush();
    while ((line = sin.readLine()) != null)
    System.out.println(line);

and here is the output i get :

* OK Gimap ready for requests from 78.185.154.27 o19if1214052bkq.44
A005 BAD Unknown command o19if1214052bkq.44
* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UNSELECT IDLE NAMESPACE QUOTA ID XLIST CHILDREN X-GM-EXT-1 UIDPLUS COMPRESS=DEFLATE
A004 OK my-mail@gmail.com my-name my-surname authenticated (Success)

what may be the problem? login works but select doesn’t work. i tried starttls , it also doesn’t work.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Because you’re doing it wrong 🙂 

    005 SELECT myinbox

    will do what you are trying to do.

    A great way to test out these sorts of things is with openssl

    openssl s_client -crlf -connect imap.gmail.com:993

    here’s an example using my gmail account. My Drafts is listed as:

    * LIST (\HasChildren \HasNoChildren) “/” “[Gmail]/Drafts”

    003 select Drafts
* FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Draft \Deleted \Seen $MDNSent Junk $Forwarded NonJunk)
* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Draft \Deleted \Seen $MDNSent Junk $Forwarded NonJunk \*)] Flags permitted.
* OK [UIDVALIDITY 620224742] UIDs valid.
* 0 EXISTS
* 0 RECENT
* OK [UIDNEXT 25] Predicted next UID.
003 OK [READ-WRITE] Drafts selected. (Success)

    That being said, what I think is happening is that the imap server is async, and you’re not waiting for it to authenticate you before sending the select command – that’s why the error is coming back before the login result in your output

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