Fetch an email with imaplib but do not mark it as

Question

I want to parse some emails from a user 's inbox but when I do:

typ, msg_data = imap_conn.fetch(uid, '(RFC822)')

It marks the email as SEEN or read. This is not the desired functionality. Do you know how can I keep the email at its previous stare either SEEN or NOT SEEN?

Answer 1

You can use (RFC822.PEEK) as the "message-parts" argument, according to RFC 1730 (I have not verified which servers actually implement that correctly, but it doesn't seem hard for them to).

Answer 2

You might also set read_only to true when selecting the folder:

imap_conn.select('Inbox', readonly=True)

Answer 3

You may use imap_tools package: https://pypi.org/project/imap-tools/

from imap_tools import MailBox, Q

# get list of email subjects from INBOX folder
with MailBox('imap.mail.com').login('[e-mail]', 'password') as mailbox:
    # mark_seen=False - not mark emails as seen on fetch
    subjects = [msg.subject for msg in mailbox.fetch(mark_seen=False)]

Answer 4

The following should work:

typ, msg_data = imap_conn.fetch(uid, '(BODY.PEEK[HEADER])')

or BODY.PEEK[TEXT], etc.