Deleting the most recently received email via Python script?

Question

I use Gmail and an application that notifies me if I've received a new email, containing its title in a tooltip. (GmailNotifier with Miranda-IM) Most of the emails I receive are ones I don't want to read, and it's annoying having to login to Gmail on a slow connection just to delete said email. I believe plugin is closed source.

I've been (unsuccessfully) trying to write a script that will login and delete the 'top' email (the one most recently received). However this is not as easy I thought it would be.

I first tried using imaplib, but discovered that it doesn't contain any of the methods I hoped it would. It's a bit like the dbapi spec, containing only minimal functionality incase the imap spec is changed. I then tried reading the imap RFC (rfc3501). Halfway through it, I realized I didn't want to write an entire mail client, so decided to try using pop3 instead.

poplib is also minimal but seemingly has what I need. However pop3 doesn't appear to sort the messages in any order I'm familiar with. I have to either call top() or retr() on every single email to read the headers if I want to see the date received.

I could probably iterate through every single message header, searching for the most recent date, but that's ugly. I want to avoid parsing my entire mailbox if possible. I also don't want to 'pop' the mailbox and download any other messages.

It's been 6 hours now and I feel no closer to a solution than when I started. Am I overlooking something simple? Is there another library I could try? (I found a 'chilkat' one, but it's bloated to hell, and I was hoping to do this with the standard library)

swanson swanson · Accepted Answer · 2010-02-14T06:50:39

import poplib

#connect to server
mailserver = poplib.POP3_SSL('pop.gmail.com')
mailserver.user('recent:YOURUSERNAME') #use 'recent mode'
mailserver.pass_('YOURPASSWORD') #consider not storing in plaintext!

#newest email has the highest message number
numMessages = len(mailserver.list()[1])

#confirm this is the right one, can comment these out later
newestEmail = mailserver.retr(numMessages)
print newestEmail

#most servers will not delete until you quit
mailserver.dele(numMessages)
mailserver.quit()

I worked with the poplib recently, writing a very primitive email client. I tested this with my email server (not gmail) on some test emails and it seemed to work correctly. I would send yourself a few dummy emails to test it out first.

Caveats:

Make sure you are using 'recent mode': http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=47948
Make sure your Gmail account has POP3 enabled: Gmail > Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP > "Enable POP for all mail"

Hope this helps, it should be enough to get you going!

Deleting the most recently received email via Python script?

1 Answers