I'm downloading my folders with a MCOIMAPFetchFoldersOperation which gives me a nice list of all my folders:
INBOX
[Gmail]
[Gmail]/All Mail
[Gmail]/Drafts
[Gmail]/Important
[Gmail]/Sent Mail
[Gmail]/Starred
[Gmail]/Trash
When I'm fetching the messages for my folders I get a good chunk of duplicates, since the same message can exist in INBOX, [Gmail]/All Mail and [Gmail]/Important et al. at the same time. I check for dupes with the messages UID, but a UID is only unique in a particular folder so that's useless in this case.
What would the most compatible approach be?
As noted in Gmail IMAP extensions, you can fetch the X-GM-MSGID attribute for a message. This value is unique across folders.
You could fetch the X-GM-MSGID value for all new messages, check which messages you have downloaded already, and download the ones that are missing.
This is what fetching a message id looks like in IMAP; not sure exactly how to do that in Mailcore2.
a006 FETCH 1 (X-GM-MSGID)
* 1 FETCH (X-GM-MSGID 1278455344230334865)
a006 OK FETCH (Success)
This is specific to Gmail. You can check whether the server supports it by looking for X-GM-EXT-1 in the CAPABILITY response. As far as I know, there is no standard way to do this; the IMAP RFCs don't have the concept of the same message being present in multiple mailboxes.
Related
I've been looking in vain for an example of this. Basically, we have a vendor that emails us files and I'm writing something that will occasionally get all the emails from the mailbox, download all the attachments, and then delete them.
But I haven't found an example of how to fetch all the emails in Java. Trying to reverse engineer from this answer
How to download attachments using Microsoft Graph API?
hasn't gotten me anywhere.
graphClient.users(mailboxAddress()). ??not sure where to go from here??
For those of you familiar with IMAP - If I retrieve a draft message (or any message for that matter), and I wish to update it / edit it, what commands should I use?
The only command i've come across is Append, which appears to only insert, meaning I would have to delete the previous draft from the mailbox?
IMAP is designed for server-side management of mailboxes, not for editing messages. So yes, you would have to retrieve the contents of the desired message (FETCH), then delete that message from the server (STORE a \Deleted flag on the message and then EXPUNGE deleted messages), and then upload the updated message to the server (APPEND). There are no IMAP commands for editing the contents of an existing message, only for updating flags related to existing messages (STORE).
Remy's answer is correct. On top of that, you could optimize the process a bit if the server supports the CATENATE extension via APPEND CATENATE (so that you could save yourself uploading the existing attachments, etc).
I am looking for the optimal way to acquire a list of the top X most recently active Gmail threads.
Background:
I am using Java accessing IMAP with OAuth in a Google Apps for Education domain. A Gmail Atom inbox feed is available which can list the last 20 threads containing unread messages. Access to this feed seems to be very fast much faster than anything I having managed to produce using OAuth/IMAP.
The advantage of using the IMAP approach over the Gmail Atom inbox feed is with IMAP I can access an arbitrary number of messages (not just 20), see read messages, get thread size, get any associated google labels, fetch quota details and check for flags. Essentially this will give my users a much more Gmail like experience (I only need a read only experience for our portal). My problem is IMAP access is significantly slower than the Atom feed. Comparison wise the IMAP method takes around 10 seconds whilst the Atom feed is usually returned within 2 seconds.
I am aware and have been working with the Gmail IMAP Extensions and Gmail Advanced Search syntax .
Current Method:
Imagine I want the top 40 threads from my IMAP inbox. Currently I download some arbitrary number of messages say (40 * 4), fetching only the X-GM-THRID. I iterate through these messages storing the thread id as I go (fetching more messages if required) until I either exhaust the list of inbox messages or I reach my target number of threads.
I then have a list of Gmail thread ids which I can use to perform an IMAP search (with an appropriate FetchProfile.Item's, depending on what message details are required).
I iterate through the search results producing something like (using the wonderful Google Guava/Google Collections Multimap):
Multimap<Long, Message> threadMultiMap = LinkedListMultimap.create();
and this is easily massaged into:
LinkedHashMap<Long, Message[]> threadMap;
Is there a better way than iterating through the INBOX until X distinct message threads have been identified?
Not actually an answer but a relevant query.
Mark, as per your api request, I'm posting a comment as an answer (http://code.google.com/p/java-gmail-imap/wiki/DisplayingGmailThreadBasedView)
Does your lib support 3 legged oauth, I tried looking for XoauthAuthenticator on the source in the repo and could not find it.
Thanks
Hi agallego,
I use java-gmail-imap with XOAUTH. There is nothing explicitly in JavaMail that requires any changes to work with XOAUTH.
If you look at the XOAUTH projects (google-mail-xoauth-tools and google-mail-xoauth-tool-java-two-legged) you will see that you can create a SASL provider that can be used to authenticate against Gmail. See e.g. XoauthAuthenticator.java
I hope this helps,
Mark
I would like to create an email client that can access multiple IMAP mailboxes. I'd also like a copy of all emails for processing. What is the best way to do this using IMAP commands?
Right now I have a script that iterates over the folders, FETCHing FLAGS on 1:* to see what's been read and if any previously read messages have been marked as new, then FETCH BODY.PEEK on all of the messages I don't have in my database. Is there a better way?
A better way would be to fetch UIDs of all messages (UID FETCH 1:* FLAGS), compare the resulting UID list with your database and then download any messages you don't have and remove any messages you have but the server doesn't (deleted by other IMAP clients or using a web interface, for example). This is the only reliable method to duplicate an IMAP folder, AFAIK.
(And don't forget to take UIDVALIDITY into account as well!)
Your original method would not work correctly if other IMAP clients were accessing the mailbox in addition to your application. In theory, it would work OK if you can stay connected to the IMAP server continuously, using NOOP and IDLE to check new and deleted messages, but this is never possible in practice - even GMail doesn't have 100% uptime :-)
An ultimate IMAP client would combine both these approaches.
I am writing a client application that fetches emails from an IMAP server and then stores them in a database. The problem is that once I have checked the mail, the next time I only want to download the mail that has arrived since. So if I had checked the server for mail two hour ago, I only want to get the mail that has arrived in the last two hours.
I could use SEARCH with SINCE DATE, but there's no support for time + date could be easily spoofed.
I also tried the RECENT flag, but that doesn't seem to work with gmail (in ruby it shows nil everytime).
You want to use the UniqueId (UID) for the messages. This is specifically why it was created.
You will want to keep track of the last UID requested, and then, to request all new messages you use the message set "[UID]:*", where [UID] is the actual UID value.
For example, lets say the last message feteched had a unique id of "123456". You would fetch
123456:*
Then, discard the first returned message.
UIDs are 'supposed' to be stable across sessions, and never change, and always increase in value. The catch to verify this, is to check the UIDValidity when you select the folder. If the UIDValidity number hasn't changed, then the UIDs should still be valid across sessions.
Here are the relevant parts from the RFC:
2.3.1.1. Unique Identifier (UID) Message Attribute
A 32-bit value assigned to each message, which when used with the
unique identifier validity value (see below) forms a 64-bit value
that MUST NOT refer to any other message in the mailbox or any
subsequent mailbox with the same name forever. Unique identifiers
are assigned in a strictly ascending fashion in the mailbox; as each
message is added to the mailbox it is assigned a higher UID than the
message(s) which were added previously. Unlike message sequence
numbers, unique identifiers are not necessarily contiguous.
The unique identifier of a message MUST NOT change during the
session, and SHOULD NOT change between sessions. Any change of
unique identifiers between sessions MUST be detectable using the
UIDVALIDITY mechanism discussed below. Persistent unique identifiers
are required for a client to resynchronize its state from a previous
session with the server (e.g., disconnected or offline access
clients); this is discussed further in [IMAP-DISC].
Note: The next unique identifier value is intended to
provide a means for a client to determine whether any
messages have been delivered to the mailbox since the
previous time it checked this value.
Here is the link with more info:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3501.html
What I would do, is also keep track of the InternalDate of the messages downloaded. This way, if you ever lose UID sync, you can at least iterate through the messages, and find the last one you downloaded, based upon the InternalDate of the message.
There's an imap flag called "seen". Most clients would mark a message seen when viewing the message, so you'd want to iterate over messages on the server which do not have that flag set.
Here's a code snippet which should give you the right idea. The operative bit of course is
imap.search(["NOT", "SEEN"]).each do bla.bla.bla
If you are you able to filter incoming mail into a specific IMAP folder on the server side, your app
can read new messages in that folder and then move them into the standard INBOX folder after it's done.