Find Gmail url-IDs via IMAP

Question

One of my favourite features of Gmail is the ability to bookmark urls to certain messages like this:

https://mail.google.com/mail/#all/124c8f386d41fd3a

What

Answer 1

Gmail provides an attribute: X-GM-THRID for thread id.

You can use imap fetch function for getting the thread id.

Also see the documentation here.

Answer 2

Seems that the google link (https://mail.google.com/mail/#all/124c8f386d41fd3a) points to the whole conversation.

IMAP itself does not have such feature (grouping conversations)

[Update]

It is possible with X-GM-THRID Gmail's IMAP extension.

124c8f386d41fd3a is Gmail's thread-id in hex.

You can read more here: http://www.limilabs.com/blog/create-gmail-url-id-via-imap

Answer 3

It's been a while but anyone who finds themselves looking for this information should read this:

Gmail provides a unique message ID for each email so that a unique message may be identified across multiple folders. Retrieval of this message ID is supported via the X-GM-MSGID attribute on the FETCH command. The message ID is a 64-bit unsigned integer and is the decimal equivalent for the ID hex string used in the web interface and the Gmail API.

The following is an example transcript of a call to retrieve the X-GM-MSGID of a message with the FETCH command:

a006 FETCH 1 (X-GM-MSGID)
* 1 FETCH (X-GM-MSGID 1278455344230334865) a006 OK FETCH (Success)

The X-GM-MSGID attribute may also be used in the SEARCH or UID SEARCH commands to find the sequence numbers or UID of a message given Gmail's message ID. The following is an example transcript of a call to retrieve the UID of a message using the UID SEARCH command:

 a007 UID SEARCH X-GM-MSGID 1278455344230334865
 * SEARCH 1 a007 OK SEARCH (Success)

the above is an extract from the following source: https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap_extensions?csw=1#access_to_the_gmail_unique_message_id_x-gm-msgid