Getting n most recent emails using IMAP and Python

Question

I\'m looking to return the n (most likely 10) most recent emails from an email accounts inbox using IMAP.

So far I\'ve cobbled together:

import imapl         


        

Answer 1

Workaround for Gmail. Since the The IMAP.sort('DATE','UTF-8','ALL') does not work for gmail ,we can insert the values and date into a list and sort the list in reverse order of date. Can check for the first n-mails using a counter. This method will take a few minutes longer if there are hundreds of mails.

    M.login(user,password)
    rv,data= M.search(None,'ALL')
    if rv=='OK':
        msg_list=[]
        for num in date[0].split():
            rv,data=M.fetch(num,'(RFC822)')
            if rv=='OK':
                msg_object={}
                msg_object_copy={}
                msg=email.message_from_bytes(data[0][1])
                msg_date=""
                for val in msg['Date'].split(' '):
                    if(len(val)==1):
                        val="0"+val
                    # to pad the single date with 0
                    msg_date=msg_date+val+" "
                msg_date=msg_date[:-1]
              # to remove the last space
                msg_object['date']= datetime.datetime.strptime(msg_date,"%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z")
            # to convert string to date time object for sorting the list
                msg_object['msg']=msg
                msg_object_copy=msg_object.copy()
                msg_list.append(msg_object_copy)
        msg_list.sort(reverse=True,key=lambda r:r['date'])
# sorts by datetime so latest mails are parsed first
        count=0
        for msg_obj in msg_list:
            count=count+1
            if count==n:
                break
            msg=msg_obj['msg']
        # do things with the message