Emails are still one of the most important means of electronic communication. Apart of everyday usage with some convenient client ( like superb Thunderbird), from time to time one might need to get messages content out of the mailbox and perform some bulk action(s) with it – an example could be to download all image attachments from your mailbox into some folder – this can be done easily manually for few emails, but what if there is 10 thousands of emails? Your mailbox is usually hosted on some server and you can access it via IMAP protocol. There are many possible ways how to achieve this, however most of them require to download or synchronize full mailbox locally and then extract required parts from messages and process them. This could be very inefficient indeed. Recently I have a need for automated task like one above – search messages in particular IMAP mailbox, identify attachments of certain type and name and download then and run a command with them, after command is finished successfully delete email (or move it to other folder). Looking around I did not found anything suitable, which would meet my requirements (Linux, command line, simple yet powerful). So having some experiences with IMAP and python, I decided to write such tool myself. It’s called imap_detach, and you can check details on it’s page. Here I’d like to present couple of use cases for this tool in hope they might be useful for people with similar email processing needs.
Tag Archives: IMAP
Why GMail is not changing all server certificates in synch?
I’m accessing my Gmail account from behind HTTPS proxy – it was described is this post. Thunderbird does not support it, for IMAP and SMTP only SOCKS proxy can work. To cope with it I’m using a small local proxy, that redirects any connection via proxy CONNECT method to remote host:port.
This works fine, but in email client I had to set IMAP server as localhost and SMTP server also as localhost. Thunderbird is cautious about it and since both connections are using TLS/SSL then there is a security issue – I’m connecting to localhost, but certificates are for *.gmail.com domain. Luckily Thunderbird enables me to set security exception – it asks me if I’ll allow that certificate for that host address, if I confirm everything works like charm until Gmail changes certificate on servers (which happens about couple time per year or so). Continue reading Why GMail is not changing all server certificates in synch?
Accessing IMAP/SMTP via HTTPS Proxy
In some places Internet access is available only via proxy, which in practice means that you are limited to HTTP and HTTPS protocols only. But if you have external email accounts like Gmail, this is bit limiting, because you cannot access your email via IMAP protocol from your email client.
However there can be a solution – if proxy support HTTPS protocol, it means also that it supports CONNECT method that tunnels a connection to remote server unchanged. This method could be used to tunnel any protocol, so basically it could tunnel also IMAP ( and SMTP for outgoing email). Continue reading Accessing IMAP/SMTP via HTTPS Proxy