Question

Neither poplib or imaplib seem to offer proxy support and I couldn’t find much info about it despite my google-fu attempts.

I’m using python to fetch emails from various imap/pop enabled servers and need to be able to do it through proxies.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to do it in python directly but using a wrapper (external program/script, OSX based) to force all traffic to go through the proxy might be enough if I can’t find anything better.

Could anyone give me a hand? I can’t imagine I’m the only one who ever needed to fetch emails through a proxy in python…

** EDIT Title edit to remove HTTP, because I shouldn’t type so fast when I’m tired, sorry for that guys **

The proxies I’m planning to use allow socks in addition to http.

Pop or Imap work through http wouldn’t make much sense (stateful vs stateless) but my understanding is that socks would allow me to do what I want.

So far the only way to achieve what I want seems to be dirty hacking of imaplib… would rather avoid it if I can.

Answer 1

You don’t need to dirtily hack imaplib. You could try using the SocksiPy package, which supports socks4, socks5 and http proxy (connect):

Something like this, obviously you’d want to handle the setproxy options better, via extra arguments to a custom __init__ method, etc.

from imaplib import IMAP4, IMAP4_SSL, IMAP4_PORT, IMAP4_SSL_PORT
from socks import sockssocket, PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS4, PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS5, PROXY_TYPE_HTTP

class SocksIMAP4(IMAP4):
    def open(self,host,port=IMAP4_PORT):
        self.host = host
        self.port = port
        self.sock = sockssocket()
        self.sock.setproxy(PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS5,'socks.example.com')
        self.sock.connect((host,port))
        self.file = self.sock.makefile('rb')

You could do similar with IMAP4_SSL. Just take care to wrap it into an ssl socket

import ssl

class SocksIMAP4SSL(IMAP4_SSL):
    def open(self, host, port=IMAP4_SSL_PORT):
        self.host = host
        self.port = port
        #actual privoxy default setting, but as said, you may want to parameterize it
        self.sock = create_connection((host, port), PROXY_TYPE_HTTP, "127.0.0.1", 8118)
        self.sslobj = ssl.wrap_socket(self.sock, self.keyfile, self.certfile)
        self.file = self.sslobj.makefile('rb')