[Solved] Script to count new mail

Question

This is a very simple problem that's confusing the hell out of me.
I want to show how many new (unread) emails I have, in my Awesome taskbar, and have it run every 10 minutes.
So I wrote a small perl script and it worked, showing 1 new mail.
The problem is that running the script again says there's no new mail. I figured the library calls were setting the new mail as read. So I tried again in python using imaplib, which lets you open the imap folder as readonly. But the same problem happens again, subsequent calls say there's no new mail.
I tried someone else's script found here but got the same result.
Can someone tell me what I'm missing here?
Last edited by r6 (2009-03-24 03:12:40)

Answer 1

I'm using a script I found in conky that pulls similar information out of the RSS/atom feed from gmail.
Here's the code:
## check-gmail.py -- A command line util to check GMail -*- Python -*-
## modified to display mailbox summary for conky
# ======================================================================
# Copyright (C) 2006 Baishampayan Ghose <[email protected]>
# Modified 2008 Hunter Loftis <[email protected]>
# Time-stamp: Mon Jul 31, 2006 20:45+0530
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as
# published by the Free Software Foundation.
# ======================================================================
import sys
import urllib # For BasicHTTPAuthentication
import feedparser # For parsing the feed
from textwrap import wrap
_URL = "https://mail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom"
uname = sys.argv[1]
password = sys.argv[2]
maxlen = sys.argv[3]
urllib.FancyURLopener.prompt_user_passwd = lambda self, host, realm: (uname, password)
def auth():
'''The method to do HTTPBasicAuthentication'''
opener = urllib.FancyURLopener()
f = opener.open(_URL)
feed = f.read()
return feed
def readmail(feed, maxlen):
'''Parse the Atom feed and print a summary'''
atom = feedparser.parse(feed)
print '%[email protected] (%s new)\n' % (uname, len(atom.entries))
# for i in range(min(len(atom.entries), maxlen)):
# print ' "%s"' % atom.entries[i].title
# print ' %s' % atom.entries[i].author
# if len(atom.entries) > maxlen:
# print ' more...'
if __name__ == "__main__":
f = auth() # Do auth and then get the feed
readmail(f, int(maxlen)) # Let the feed be chewed by feedparser
then you just call the script with python /path/to/script/ username password #ofEmailTitlesToDisplay.
Hope that helps?
Lswest
it requires the package python-feedparser from extra.
Last edited by lswest (2009-03-19 19:14:34)