gocept.imapapi 0.1

About

gocept.imapapi is sponsored by the Technical University Munich as part of a research co-operation to provide an integrated webmail system to the university’s student portal MyTum. Other components of this project include gocept.restmail and CMFWebmail.

This project was initially developed by gocept gmbh & co. kg.

Object-oriented API

One of the earliest goals of the webmail project was to factor out the lower-level utilities to allow other people to built on our efforts.

This library takes on to provide a better abstracted, more object-oriented, well, more pythonic approach than the builtin imaplib does.

Let us give you an example of what we feel a good API looks like:

>>> from gocept.imapapi import Account
>>> account = Account('localhost', 10143, 'tim', 'mightywizard')
>>> account.folders.keys()
['INBOX']
>>> account.folders['INBOX'].messages
<Messages object at 0x...>
>>> for message in account.folders['INBOX'].messages.values():
...     repr(message.headers['subject'])
u'Re: your spell from last week'
u'Enlarge your magic wand!'

Some of the aspects that come to mind when looking at this example:

• Object model over protocol specifics

• Use of native Python data structures

• Decode protocol-specific data as soon as possible (Do you see the unicode headers?)

With those approaches we try to make programming IMAP clients simpler and more convenient.

Performance

The API tries to keep the amount and size of communication as low as possible, only retrieving data when really needed, and re-using data it already has.

Examples include that body content isn’t downloaded until needed and even when body content structure is looked at we differentiate between its meta-data and the actual content.

Status

This package is still in early development and published for experimental purposes and to invite a wider community to join us developing an IMAP library that is more convenient than Python’s builtin imaplib.

Code access

The code lives in the public gocept repository:

• https://svn.gocept.com/repos/gocept/gocept.imapapi

• http://svn.gocept.com/viewcvs/gocept.imapapi/

Running the tests

The tests expect an IMAP server to be available on localhost:10143. The default buildout environment provides a dovecot installation for this.

As we aim to be compatible with as many IMAP servers as possible, you should be able to provide any IMAP server on this port, as long as a user ‘test’ with the password ‘bsdf’ is configured.

Warning: Do not let the tests run against a production system. They might wreak havoc.