How to create an email and send it to specific mailbox with imaplib

Question

I am trying to use python's imaplib to create an email and send it to a mailbox with specific name, e.g. INBOX. Anyone has some great suggestion :).

Answer 1

The IMAP protocol is not designed to send emails. It is designed to manipulate mailboxes.

To create an email and send it you can use SMTP, as in smtplib.

To move an email that is already in a mailbox from one folder to another, you can copy the mail to the needed folder and delete it from the old one using uid, as in the answer here.

Answer 2

You can use Python's built-in imaplib module and the append() command to append a mail message to an IMAP folder:

import imaplib

connection = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(HOSTNAME)
connection.login(USERNAME, PASSWORD)

new_message = email.message.Message()
new_message["From"] = "hello@itsme.com"
new_message["Subject"] = "My new mail."
new_message.set_payload("This is my message.")

connection.append('INBOX', '', imaplib.Time2Internaldate(time.time()), str(new_message))

• The official imaplib documentation.
• More detailed examples of using imaplib.

Answer 3

Since I cannot yet comment on user3556956's comment, here is the answer for python3 :

connection.append('INBOX', '', imaplib.Time2Internaldate(time.time()), str(new_message).encode('utf-8'))

In short you have to pass the message as a byte instead of a python string.

Answer 4

No idea how they do it but doesn't Microsoft Outlook let you move an email from a local folder to a remote IMAP folder?