How to download only unread attachments from a specific gmail tag?

Question

I have a Python script adapted from Loading MMS messages sent to Gmail using Python

import email, getpass, imaplib, os detach_dir = '.' # directory where to save attachments (default: current) user = raw_input("Enter your GMail username:") pwd = getpass.getpass("Enter your password: ") # connecting to the gmail imap server m = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL("imap.gmail.com") m.login(user,pwd) m.select("[Gmail]/All Mail") # here you a can choose a mail box like INBOX instead # use m.list() to get all the mailboxes resp, items = m.search(None, 'FROM', '"Impact Stats Script"') # you could filter using the IMAP rules here (check http://www.example-code.com/csharp/imap-search-critera.asp) items = items[0].split() # getting the mails id for emailid in items: resp, data = m.fetch(emailid, "(RFC822)") # fetching the mail, "`(RFC822)`" means "get the whole stuff", but you can ask for headers only, etc email_body = data[0][1] # getting the mail content mail = email.message_from_string(email_body) # parsing the mail content to get a mail object #Check if any attachments at all if mail.get_content_maintype() != 'multipart': continue print "["+mail["From"]+"] :" + mail["Subject"] # we use walk to create a generator so we can iterate on the parts and forget about the recursive headach for part in mail.walk(): # multipart are just containers, so we skip them if part.get_content_maintype() == 'multipart': continue # is this part an attachment ? if part.get('Content-Disposition') is None: continue filename = part.get_filename() counter = 1 # if there is no filename, we create one with a counter to avoid duplicates if not filename: filename = 'part-%03d%s' % (counter, 'bin') counter += 1 att_path = os.path.join(detach_dir, filename) #Check if its already there if not os.path.isfile(att_path) : # finally write the stuff fp = open(att_path, 'wb') fp.write(part.get_payload(decode=True)) fp.close() 

I filter messages by topic and receive attachments, but now I only need to receive attachments from new letters. Is there any way to modify m.search() to return only unread emails?

Answer 1

Try changing this line:

 resp, items = m.search(None, 'FROM', '"Impact Stats Script"') 

in

 resp, items = m.search(None, 'UNSEEN', 'FROM', '"Impact Stats Script"') 

The Python imaplib documentation only shows the addition of additional search criteria , and the IMAP specification defines UNSEEN search criteria:

  UNSEEN Messages that do not have the \Seen flag set.