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pythongmailimap

How do I enable push-notification for IMAP (Gmail) using Python imaplib?


Is there a way to monitor a gmail account using imaplib without polling gmail each time I want to see if there is new mail. Or in other words, I just want the script to be notified of a new message so I can process it right away instead of any lag time between polls.

I see that the IMAP protocol supports this with the IDLE command, but I can't see anything documented with it in the imaplib docs, so any help with this would be great!


Solution

  • There isn't something in imaplib that does this, AFAIK (disclamer: I know very little about Python), however, it seems that someone has implemented an IDLE extension for Python which has the same interface as imaplib (which you can swap out with no changes to existing code, apparently):

    https://github.com/imaplib2/imaplib2