Cannot resolve module 'imaplib2' has no attribute 'IMAP4_SSL'

Question

There are many questions regarding imaplib2 has no attribute IMAP4_SSL but none of the solutions in the other questions worked for me.

I have a python script that's been running without issue for years on AWS, but after I upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS , it started throwing the error about IMAP4_SSL . After looking into the issue, I believe it may have something to do with the mappings in Python, but it all looks correct to me. I also checked that there are no other Python versions installed that could cause a conflict.

Here are the paths for Python and the imaplib2 package

$ which python3
/usr/bin/python3

$ python3 --version
Python 3.8.5

$ whereis python3
'/usr/bin/python3.8-config'
'/usr/bin/python3'
'/usr/bin/python3.8'
'/usr/lib/python3'
'/usr/lib/python3.8'
'/usr/lib/python3.9'
'/etc/python3'
'/etc/python3.8'
'/usr/local/lib/python3.8'
'/usr/include/python3.8'
'/usr/share/python3'
'/usr/share/man/man1/python3.1.gz'

$ sys.path
''
'/usr/lib/python38.zip'
'/usr/lib/python3.8'
'/usr/lib/python3.8/lib-dynload'
'/home/ubuntu/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages'
'/usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages'
'/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages'

> import imaplib2
> imaplib2.__file__
'/home/ubuntu/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/imaplib2/__init__.py'

Answer 1

The problem is likely that you are using an outdated version of imaplib2 from PyPI. You can install a newer version on Ubuntu using the following command.

sudo apt install python3-imaplib2

(Alternatively, if you are not on Ubuntu, you can always install from source .)

Depending on your PYTHONPATH and the location where you installed the old version of imaplib2 , you may also need to uninstall the old version using pip before import imaplib2 will import the right version.

python3 -m pip uninstall imaplib2