IMAP fetch body too slow

Question

Trying to get emails from IMAP(gmail) and struggling with the last part.

If I fetch just message headers, for a 85 messages in my inbox, it took 3 seconds:

imap.fetch(message_ids, '(BODY.PEEK[HEADER.FIELDS (FROM TO CC SUBJECT DATE)])')

But if i try to fetch the email body, it takes ~3 minutes:

imap.fetch(message_ids, '(RFC822)')

or

imap.fetch(message_ids, '(BODY.PEEK[TEXT])')

or

imap.fetch(message_ids, 'RFC822.TEXT')

Already tried to set TCP_NODELAY as some thread suggested here. Same problem with imapClient lib and Twisted imap4 module

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

All of those will retrieve the full MIME content of the message, which can be quite large if they include attachments, and will take quite a while.

If you fetch BODYSTRUCTURE, you can parse the format/structure of the message, and get an idea of the size before you download it, and where exactly the main "body" part is.