Search in Gmail using imaplib

Question

import imaplib

user = raw_input("Enter your GMail username:")
pwd = getpass.getpass("Enter your password: ")


m = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL("imap.gmail.com")
m.login(user,pwd)
m.select("[Gmail]/Inbox") # here you a can choose a mail box like INBOX instead
m.search("NEW")

I'm trying to select only new messages in Gmail, via imap in Python. Problem is, I always get the following error:

imaplib.error: command SEARCH illegal in state AUTH

I googled it and read that I'd have to use imap4, but I'm already using it I can't really figure out how to solve it.

Answer 1

The problem seems to be that there is no mailbox called [Gmail]/Inbox . It is possible to get a listing of all valid mailboxes by calling m.list() .

I discovered this by using Python's interactive shell (with Python 2.6), where it shows the response from the IMAP server for each IMAP operation.

Note: When using the Python interactive shell, importing pprint and calling pprint.pprint(m.<method of m>(<params>)) would probably be a good idea for some IMAP commands which send back lots of information.

Answer 2

One more thing - imaplib's select() function selects INBOX for you by default, seems cleaner.

http://docs.python.org/library/imaplib.html#imaplib.IMAP4.select

Answer 3

import imaplib     
obj = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('imap.gmail.com', 993)    
obj.login('username', 'password')    
obj.select('**label name**') <-- the label in which u want to search message    
obj.search(None, 'FROM', '"LDJ"')

Answer 4

For me, it was having "[Gmail]" that was problematic:

Ie change this:

m.select("[Gmail]/Inbox") 

to this:

m.select("Inbox") 

Regardless, using m.list() as the person above suggested is a good start.