Minimal Python IMAP over SSL example

Note: Consider using IMAP with TLS instead of IMAP over SSL. See Minimal Python IMAP over TLS example.

This example code will login to the server using port 993 (IMAP over SSL), list the mailboxes and logout immediately.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import imaplib

server = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('imap.mydomain.com')
server.login('[email protected]', 'password')
# Print list of mailboxes on server
code, mailboxes = server.list()
for mailbox in mailboxes:
    print(mailbox.decode("utf-8"))
# Select mailbox
server.select("INBOX")
# Cleanup
server.close()

Remember to replace:

• imap.mydomain.com with the domain name or IP address of your IMAP server
• [email protected] by the email address you want to login with
• password by the password you want to login with

When running this script, a successful output might look like this:

(\HasChildren) "." INBOX
(\HasNoChildren) "." INBOX.Spam
(\HasNoChildren) "." INBOX.Drafts
(\HasNoChildren) "." INBOX.Sent
(\HasNoChildren) "." INBOX.Trash

If your credentials don’t work you’ll see an error message like this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./imaptest.py", line 5, in <module>
    server.login('[email protected]', 'mypassword')
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/imaplib.py", line 598, in login
    raise self.error(dat[-1])
imaplib.error: b'[AUTHENTICATIONFAILED] Authentication failed.'

Note that in order to be able to server.close() the connection, it’s required that you server.select() a mailbox first ; this is why we can’t just omit the server.select("INBOX") line even though we don’t actually do anything with the mailbox. See this post for a more concise example on this behaviour.