Getting n most recent emails using IMAP and Python

this is work for me~

import imaplib
from email.parser import HeaderParser
M = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('my.server')
user = 'username'
password = 'password'
M.login(user, password)
(retcode, messages) =M.search(None, 'ALL')
 news_mail = get_mostnew_email(messages)
for i in news_mail :
    data = M.fetch(i, '(BODY[HEADER])')
    header_data = data[1][0][1]
    parser = HeaderParser()
    msg = parser.parsestr(header_data)
    print msg['subject']

and this is get the newer email function :

def get_mostnew_email(messages):
    """
    Getting in most recent emails using IMAP and Python
    :param messages:
    :return:
    """
    ids = messages[0]  # data is a list.
    id_list = ids.split()  # ids is a space separated string
    #latest_ten_email_id = id_list  # get all
    latest_ten_email_id = id_list[-10:]  # get the latest 10
    keys = map(int, latest_ten_email_id)
    news_keys = sorted(keys, reverse=True)
    str_keys = [str(e) for e in news_keys]
    return  str_keys

This is the code to get the emailFrom, emailSubject, emailDate, emailContent etc..

import imaplib, email, os
user = "[email protected]"
password = "pass"
imap_url = "imap.gmail.com"
connection = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(imap_url)
connection.login(user, password)
result, data = connection.uid('search', None, "ALL")
if result == 'OK':
    for num in data[0].split():
        result, data = connection.uid('fetch', num, '(RFC822)')
        if result == 'OK':
            email_message = email.message_from_bytes(data[0][1])
            print('From:' + email_message['From'])
            print('To:' + email_message['To'])
            print('Date:' + email_message['Date'])
            print('Subject:' + str(email_message['Subject']))
            print('Content:' + str(email_message.get_payload()[0]))
connection.close()
connection.logout()        

# get recent one email
from imap_tools import MailBox
with MailBox('imap.mail.com').login('[email protected]', 'password', 'INBOX') as mailbox:
   for msg in mailbox.fetch(limit=1, reverse=True):
       print(msg.date_str, msg.subject)

https://github.com/ikvk/imap_tools

Workaround for Gmail. Since the The IMAP.sort(‘DATE’,’UTF-8′,’ALL’) does not work for gmail ,we can insert the values and date into a list and sort the list in reverse order of date. Can check for the first n-mails using a counter. This method will take a few minutes longer if there are hundreds of mails.

    M.login(user,password)
    rv,data= M.search(None,'ALL')
    if rv=='OK':
        msg_list=[]
        for num in date[0].split():
            rv,data=M.fetch(num,'(RFC822)')
            if rv=='OK':
                msg_object={}
                msg_object_copy={}
                msg=email.message_from_bytes(data[0][1])
                msg_date=""
                for val in msg['Date'].split(' '):
                    if(len(val)==1):
                        val="0"+val
                    # to pad the single date with 0
                    msg_date=msg_date+val+" "
                msg_date=msg_date[:-1]
              # to remove the last space
                msg_object['date']= datetime.datetime.strptime(msg_date,"%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z")
            # to convert string to date time object for sorting the list
                msg_object['msg']=msg
                msg_object_copy=msg_object.copy()
                msg_list.append(msg_object_copy)
        msg_list.sort(reverse=True,key=lambda r:r['date'])
# sorts by datetime so latest mails are parsed first
        count=0
        for msg_obj in msg_list:
            count=count+1
            if count==n:
                break
            msg=msg_obj['msg']
        # do things with the message

To get the latest mail:

This will return all the mail numbers contained inside the 2nd return value which is a list containing a bytes object:

imap.search(None, "ALL")[1][0]

This will split the bytes object of which the last element can be taken by accessing the negative index:

imap.search(None, "ALL")[1][0].split()[-1]

You may use the mail number to access the corresponding mail.