How many imbrication in an IMAP search query

Question

I'm trying to make complex IMAP search query using bare python imaplib .

The query is pretty much simple I have a list of emails and I'm trying to query all messages with thoses adresses.

A simple query may look like this:

[
  ['OR',
    ['FROM', 'email1@domain.com'],
    ['OR',
      ['FROM', 'email2@domain.com'],
      ['FROM', 'email3@domain.com']
]]]

But when I began to make this kind of query with large set of addresses (more thant 5) I get:

SEARCH command error: BAD [b'Command Argument Error. 12']

Does the IMAP protocol have such limitation? Maybe because of the complexity of the query? Or is the max imbrication layer?

My references or:

• IMAP rfc: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3501.html
• Python imaplib library: https://docs.python.org/3/library/imaplib.html

Answer 1

IMAP Query limitations may be on your email server side. This is independent of imaplib.

You can try to use IMAP query builder from my lib: https://github.com/ikvk/imap_tools

It can helps to build such queries much easier.

For example, i have successfully try to do this at (YANDEX, ZIMBRA, OUTLOOK, GOOGLE):

from imap_tools import MailBox, OR
with MailBox('imap.mail.com').login('test@mail.com', 'pwd') as mailbox:
    for msg in mailbox.fetch(OR(from_=['1@a','2@a','3@a','4@a','5@a','6@a','hello@ya.ru'])):
        print(msg.date)