Support for getting back all messages in a thread?

First, thank you for this great library, it definitely simplifies using imap over some other libraries in python land.

I’ve been trying to use this to be able to download all messages in a thread ( reply-to chain ), and the only way I’ve been able to do this was via searching the Header for a In-Reply-To message-id from the first email, or via the References Header field ( although that has been less reliable ).

I was wondering if imap_tools provided and easier way to do this, and if not whether that’s something that would be good to implement?

[ikvk]

Hi, Key question: how do I do this without the imap_tools library? As far as I understand, it is not possible to do this universally by now.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16816425/

I think you’re taking the right approach.

[elithompson]

Related: I needed to get the Gmail thread ids from messages and was able to subclass Mailbox to get it like this:

import re
from typing import Iterable, Sequence
from imap_tools import MailBox


class Mbox(MailBox):
    def _fetch_in_bulk(self, message_nums: Sequence[str], message_parts: str, reverse: bool) -> Iterable[list]:
        # attach the X-GM-THRID flag so Gmail returns the values
        message_parts = message_parts.replace(")", " X-GM-THRID)")
        return super(Mbox, self)._fetch_in_bulk(message_nums, message_parts, reverse)


def get():
    thrid_search = re.compile(r"X-GM-THRID (\d+)")
    with Mbox("imap.gmail.com").login("[e-mail]", "password") as mb:
        messages = mb.fetch(bulk=True)
        for message in messages:
            d = message._raw_uid_data.decode("utf-8")
            result = re.search(thrid_search, d)
            thrid = result.groups()[0]
            print(message.uid)
            print("\t GmThrid:", thrid)