Check for new email using command line

Question

I'm on Ubuntu and I have some email accounts on gmail that I would like to poll every once in awhile to see if there's any new mail. I want to write a script for this, so that everytime I run the script it tells me how many new messages I have from my account(s). What application would I have to run from the command line to do such a thing? Everything I find online talks about using the "mail" command, but that seems to check some local mail directory instead of my remote email (obviously, any such application would also require me to configure it to log into my account with the correct password).

Have you read http://stackoverflow.com/a/1231136/1387612 – janisz Aug 03 '12 at 22:47 — janisz, Aug 03 '12 at 22:47
Thanks, I didn't see that before! – bhh1988 Aug 05 '12 at 00:47 — bhh1988, Aug 05 '12 at 00:47

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 03 '12 at 22:47

3

Python makes it fairly easy to check IMAP accounts without needing to install any extra packages.

There's a good writeup at Yuji Tomita's blog on how to use python's imaplib to talk to Gmail. http://yuji.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/python-imaplib-imap-example-with-gmail/

answered Aug 03 '12 at 22:47

Sam Mussmann

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Yes that guide helped a lot. In the end, the following search query seemed to do just what I wanted: mail.search(None, "UNSEEN"). And after that, getting the id list and printing its length gives the number of new messages. – bhh1988 Aug 05 '12 at 00:48

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 06 '13 at 01:18

3

Try the following:

curl -u user@gmail.com:password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | perl -ne 'print "\t" if /<name>/; print "$2\n" if /<(title|name)>(.*)<\/\1>/;' | espeak

edited Feb 06 '13 at 01:18

Tim Post

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answered Feb 05 '13 at 16:55

user2043985

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Check for new email using command line

2 Answers2