Unread messages

To see how many unread messages you have, you can call the list() method from the mailbox object. Use the following code to find out how many unread messages you have:

number_messages = len(mailbox.list()[1])

With this, we just have to loop and get the messages one by one to analyze them:

for i in range (num_messages):
   print("Message number "+str(i+1))
   print("--------------------")
   # read message
   response, headerLines, bytes = mailbox.retr(i+1)

The retr(i+1) method brings the message from the server whose number is indicated and marks it on the server as read. It is set to i+1 because the retr() method starts at 1 and not at zero. This method returns the server response, the message, and a few bytes related to the message that we are reading. The important thing is headerLines, which in some way contains all of the lines of the message.