3/24/2023 0 Comments Imap attachment downloaderWarning: If used with some arguments (–delete, –move) it can significantly modify your mailbox – so be careful!Ĭommad to run is called detach.py, detach.py -h will show help message – for convenience help is shown in next section.Ĭonnection to server must be specified with -host, -user and -password arguments, -host is just a server name or host:port, if non standard port is used. And you are always welcomed to log issue on github. It’s left to users to explore peculiarities of particular IMAP server. From tests with other servers we saw some differentness ( for instance Gmail subject search works only for full words). It has to be understood that compliance level of various IMAP server implementations differs – our tool has been tested mostly against dovecot – which provides best IMAPv4 compliance level. Optionally for processed messages we can do some IMAP actions on the message – like delete it, move to other folder or mark is as seen.Use filter expression again for all parts – now we have all details to identify relevant parts – for our sample expression we select just PDF attachments.For all messages identified by IMAP search we download message structure (BODYSTRUCTURE), which provides necessary details about message parts.For our sample filter expression above IMAP search will look like (NOT SEEN FROM “john.doe”) – so it provides message IDs for all unseen messages from john.doe. So IMAP search can only provide a superset of messages we are interested in. However IMAP search is less powerful then our expressions, especially many servers cannot search on part attributes like content type, file name etc. Convert filter expression into IMAP search keywords.This expression basically says – get me all attached PDF files, which were sent by john.doe (from whatever domain) and which I have not seen yet.Īnd this is our formula how to get relevant attachments / message parts using the filter expression: ! seen & from ~="john.doe" & mime= "application/pdf". With this expression you can easily specify, which attachments you’d like to download. We use a simple filter expression, described in detail in the next section. Our tool exploits advanced features of IMAP to get only those data, that are necessary to download required parts of email messages. This approach is indeed inefficient, because much more data are downloaded, then is finally needed. Similar tools or scripts for downloading attachments often take simplified approach – they download all messages from a folder and then parse message locally and extract required parts and save them. IMAP protocol is pretty complex and provides many advanced operations with messages – for our purpose these three are of special importance: search, MIME message structure parsing and MIME message parts download. IMAP server organizes emails into folders (Inbox, Sent, Drafts …, you can also easily create your own folders) and enables you to access to particular folders. IMAP is a protocol for communication with mailbox server – e.g. Below is a sample MIME message structure: For the purpose of parts nesting MIME defines special content types – multipart. List of all content types is here.Įmail message following MIME standard can have multiple parts, which can be nested, so message parts form a tree structure. Content types are registered by IANA for every possible media type. Content type consists from two parts: type and subtype, separated by slash. Content type defines media type within particular message part – for message text it can be text/plain or text/html, for PDF document it’s application/pdf, for PNG image it’s image/png etc. The message and each of its parts have a header, which defines it’s type ( Content-type field in the header) and how it’s attached to the message ( Content-disposition field in the header, which also defines file name of the attachment). MIME defines structure of an email message and it enables the message to have multiple parts. To work efficiently with this tool you need at least basic understanding of two email technologies MIME and IMAP. The tool is fairly universal and can be used with various IMAP servers for various tasks. Imap_detach is a command line tool, which enables you to automatically download email attachments (or particular email parts) from your mailbox via IMAP protocol.
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