Question

This is a smaller portion of a bigger project. I need to only get unread emails and a parse their headers. How can I modify the following script to only get unread emails?

conn = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(imap_server)
conn.login(imap_user, imap_password)

status, messages = conn.select('INBOX')    

if status != "OK":
    print "Incorrect mail box"
    exit()

print messages

Answer 1

Something like this will do the trick.

conn = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(imap_server)

try:
    (retcode, capabilities) = conn.login(imap_user, imap_password)
except:
    print sys.exc_info()[1]
    sys.exit(1)

conn.select(readonly=1) # Select inbox or default namespace
(retcode, messages) = conn.search(None, '(UNSEEN)')
if retcode == 'OK':
    for num in messages[0].split(' '):
        print 'Processing :', message
        typ, data = conn.fetch(num,'(RFC822)')
        msg = email.message_from_string(data[0][1])
        typ, data = conn.store(num,'-FLAGS','\\Seen')
        if ret == 'OK':
            print data,'\n',30*'-'
            print msg

conn.close()

There’s also a duplicate question here – Find new messages added to an imap mailbox since I last checked with python imaplib2?

Two useful functions for you to retrieve the body and attachments of the new message you detected (reference: How to fetch an email body using imaplib in python?) –

def getMsgs(servername="myimapserverfqdn"):
  usernm = getpass.getuser()
  passwd = getpass.getpass()
  subject = 'Your SSL Certificate'
  conn = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(servername)
  conn.login(usernm,passwd)
  conn.select('Inbox')
  typ, data = conn.search(None,'(UNSEEN SUBJECT "%s")' % subject)
  for num in data[0].split():
    typ, data = conn.fetch(num,'(RFC822)')
    msg = email.message_from_string(data[0][1])
    typ, data = conn.store(num,'-FLAGS','\\Seen')
    yield msg

def getAttachment(msg,check):
  for part in msg.walk():
    if part.get_content_type() == 'application/octet-stream':
      if check(part.get_filename()):
        return part.get_payload(decode=1)

PS: If you pass by in 2020 after python 2.7 death: replace email.message_from_string(data[0][1]) with email.message_from_bytes(data[0][1])