morgon has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi,

I have a few imap-accounts that I would like to process with a script.

Currently I am using Net::IMAP::Client and I can connect and login without problem.

However I seem to have a problem with the gmail-account.

If I do e.g. 

my $msg_ids = $imap->search("ALL", "DATE");

[download]
I get an array-ref containing message-ids sorted by date on a "normal" imap-account.

But if I try this on a gmail-account I get an undef. However $imap->search("ALL") works everwhere, even with gmail.

So it seems that gmail does not like to sort.

So my question is: How can I hack around this?

Is there a way to treat gmail just like any other imap-account or will it always be a special case?

Would another library do the trick?

Many thanks!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: imap problem with gmail -- RFC 5256
by Discipulus (Canon) on Nov 03, 2017 at 08:20 UTC
    Hello morgon,

    I used the below quick program to access gmail account via IMAP. The module I use is Net::IMAP::Simple and it's docs tell us that the search in IMAP is defined in RFC 5256. The module has the capability to search but a a quick (read: no exhaustive) serach seems to suggest that gmail doesn't support RFC 5256. Anyway I confirm that the only search that runs ok with gmail is $imap->search("ALL")

    use strict;
use warnings;

# required modules
use Net::IMAP::Simple;
use Email::Simple;
use IO::Socket::SSL;
use HTML::Strip;
use Data::Dump;

# fill in your details here
my $username = 'my_account_of_gmail@gmail.com';
my $password = $ARGV[0] || die "password as first argument!";
my $mailhost = 'pop.gmail.com';

# Connect
my $imap = Net::IMAP::Simple->new(
    $mailhost,
    port    => 993,
    use_ssl => 1,
) || die "Unable to connect to IMAP: $Net::IMAP::Simple::errstr\n";

my $hs = HTML::Strip->new();

# Log in
if ( !$imap->login( $username, $password ) ) {
    print STDERR "Login failed: " . $imap->errstr . "\n";
    exit(64);
}
# Look in the the INBOX
my $nm = $imap->select('INBOX');

# How many messages are there?
my ($unseen, $recent, $num_messages) = $imap->status();
print "unseen: $unseen, recent: $recent, total: $num_messages\n\n";


## Iterate through unseen messages
for ( my $i = 1 ; $i <= $nm ; $i++ ) {
    #last if $i == 2;
    if ( $imap->seen($i) ) {
        next;
    }
    else {
    my $es = Email::Simple->new( join '', @{ $imap->get($i) } );


    printf( "[%03d] %s\n", $i, $es->header('From'), $es->header('Subje
+ct'));
    #print "BODY[".$es->body."]\n\n";
    print "Cc-------------->", $es->header('Cc'),"\nTo------>",$es->he
+ader('To'),"\n";
    #dd $es;
    print $hs->parse( $es->body );
    print +('=' x 70),"\n";
    }
}
# Disconnect
$imap->quit;

exit;

    [download]

    L*

    There are no rules, there are no thumbs..
    Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      Thanks for the reply.

      Yes gmail seems to do it's own thing when it comes to imap, but how do you get around it with the imap-libraries that cpan offers?

      How do you retrieve (say) the 5 newest mails programmatically?

      Does anyone know?

[reply]
Re: imap problem with gmail
by RonW (Parson) on Nov 03, 2017 at 23:14 UTC
[reply]
      Actually no, but thanks for the suggestion.

      Net::IMAP::Simple::Gmail is just 20 (or so) lines of code that does not do very much.

      As far as I can see all it does is using "X-GM-RAW" for searches - something that also could just as easily achieved with Net::IMAP::Simple.

      As for the sorting it is no help at all. It's just that Gmail' paradigm is searching and not sorting....

      Oh well.. it's simply a special case, regardless of the library you use.

[reply]

Back to Seekers of Perl Wisdom