Python imaplib无法通过地址搜索

Question

I'm trying to find mails matching a particular FROM address. I've looked at this answer but it doesn't work for me.

Here's the relevant code:

import imaplib

conn = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(IMAPserver)
conn.login(IMAPuserName, IMAPpassword)
retVal, data = conn.select("INBOX")
    if retVal != "OK":
        <PRINT SOME ERROR MESSAGE>
        sys.exit(1)

All this works. Here are some variations of the search command that don't work:

retVal, data = conn.search(None, 'UNSEEN HEADER FROM "foo@example.com"')

retVal, data = conn.search(None, 'UNSEEN FROM "foo@example.com"')

retVal, data = conn.search(None, 'FROM "foo@example.com"')

retVal, data = conn.search(None, 'HEADER FROM "foo@example.com"')

All of these result in errors like these:

    imaplib.error: SEARCH command error: BAD ['Error in IMAP command SEARCH: 
Unexpected string as search key: FROM "foo@example.com"']

I've referred to the relevant section of the IMAP v4 RFC but I can't figure out what exactly I'm doing wrong. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I managed to get info from the guys managing the IMAP server. This was a server problem and not something to do with the code.

The IMAP server in question is a customised version of Dovecot. It actually indexes all mailboxes to make searching etc. faster. In this particular case the index for my mailbox had gotten corrupted. Re-indexing fixed the problem.

Answer 2

As shown in the examples in the docmentation, IMAP.search() expects the search arguments as individual, positional arguments, not as a single string:

conn.search(None, 'UNSEEN', 'HEADER', 'FROM', 'foo@example.com')
conn.search(None, 'UNSEEN', 'FROM', 'foo@example.com')
conn.search(None, 'FROM', 'foo@example.com')
conn.search(None, 'HEADER', 'FROM', 'foo@example.com')

If you pass in a single argument, imaplib will pass it as a single quoted argument to the SEARCH command.

Again, however, you cannot rely on this, since the quoting only happens for Python 2.x imaplib . Python 3.x imaplib does not do the quoting for you and that particular bug is still open .

One way around that --as stated by the documentation-- is to "pre-quote" the arguments as a list:

conn.search(None, '(UNSEEN HEADER FROM foo@example.com)')
conn.search(None, '(UNSEEN FROM foo@example.com)')
conn.search(None, '(FROM foo@example.com)')
conn.search(None, '(HEADER FROM foo@example.com)')

But as noted by @Max, this is not supported by some IMAP servers.