How do I fetch emails leaving them read/unread in Python?

Question

I have a little tool that exists because my email client does not support IMAP Push extensions as implemented by gmail. Typical usage is something like this:

live-email -n 10

Which shows the id and subject of the first 10.

So some example output might be:

1242: Hello!
1241: Your email
1240: Re: 
...

The code (simplified for this question) is the following:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from imaplib import IMAP4_SSL
from netrc import netrc
from email import message_from_bytes
from argparse import ArgumentParser

parser = ArgumentParser(description='Check email')
parser.add_argument('-n', '--count', dest='count', action='store',
                   default=1, type=int,
                   help='How many messages to show')

args = parser.parse_args()

conn = IMAP4_SSL('imap.gmail.com')
auth = netrc().hosts['imap.gmail.com']

conn.login(auth[0], auth[2])
conn.select()

typ, data = conn.search(None, 'ALL')
i = 0
for num in reversed(data[0].split()):
    i += 1
    typ, data = conn.fetch(num, '(RFC822)')
    email = message_from_bytes(data[0][1])
    print("%i: %s" % (int(num), email.get('subject')))
    if i == args.count:
        break

conn.close()
conn.logout()

The above works. The problem is that the act of fetching each email marks it as read. I'd like to leave the state of the email alone. I suspect I'd know how to do this if I knew more about IMAP but I alas do not know that protocol. Any ideas?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 07 '21 at 10:58

Unsurprisingly, reading over RFC 2060 gave me the answer. The solution is to use (BODY.PEEK[]) instead of (RFC822). So the complete answer is:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from imaplib import IMAP4_SSL
from netrc import netrc
from email import message_from_bytes
from argparse import ArgumentParser

parser = ArgumentParser(description='Check email')
parser.add_argument('-n', '--count', dest='count', action='store',
                   default=1, type=int,
                   help='How many messages to show')

args = parser.parse_args()

conn = IMAP4_SSL('imap.gmail.com')
auth = netrc().hosts['imap.gmail.com']

conn.login(auth[0], auth[2])
conn.select()

typ, data = conn.search(None, 'ALL')
i = 0
for num in reversed(data[0].split()):
    i += 1
    typ, data = conn.fetch(num, '(BODY.PEEK[])')
    email = message_from_bytes(data[0][1])
    print("%i: %s" % (int(num), email.get('subject')))
    if i == args.count:
        break

conn.close()
conn.logout()

How do I fetch emails leaving them read/unread in Python?

1 Answers1