MBOX-Line: From johnl-imap at iecc.com  Wed Dec 28 08:13:05 2016
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: John Levine <johnl-imap@iecc.com>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:55 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] is IMAP still the protocol to use to read
	emails???
In-Reply-To: <7b8b6e00-3396-2c08-f58e-290d619214ea@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20161228161305.29711.qmail@ary.lan>

In article <7b8b6e00-3396-2c08-f58e-290d619214ea@gmail.com> you write:
>I am a little confused. I code in Python ( 3.5.1) and I am "trying" to read the body of
>messages from a gmail account.  The issue is that I see a lot of POP3 activity on stack
>exchange and google but very little for IMAP. So is IMAP dead? If so what should I be
>looking at?

IMAP is very much alive.  Approximately every smartphone in the world uses it to
handle their users' email accounts.

The reason you see so much more about POP3 is that POP is about 1/100 as complex
as IMAP, so if can do what you want, it's much easier to use.

>All I want to do is read in my email body and do something with it. I really am having
>issues like the one below.

I've found that the third party python imapclient library is a lot
easier to use than the standard imaplib.  It deals with many of the
datatype strangenesses you've been running into.

R's,
John

