Supported Mailbox Types

Django Mailbox supports polling both common internet mailboxes like POP3 and IMAP as well as local file-based mailboxes.

‘Protocol’ Options
Mailbox Type ‘Protocol’:// Notes
POP3 pop3:// Can also specify SSL with pop3+ssl://
IMAP imap:// Can also specify SSL with imap+ssl:// or STARTTLS with imap+tls; additional configuration is also possible: see POP3 and IMAP Mailboxes for details.
Gmail IMAP gmail+ssl:// Uses OAuth authentication for Gmail’s IMAP transport. See gmail-oauth for details.
Maildir maildir://  
Mbox mbox://  
Babyl babyl://  
MH mh://  
MMDF mmdf://  
Piped Mail empty See Receiving mail directly from Exim4 or Postfix via a pipe

Warning

Unless you are using IMAP’s ‘Archive’ feature, this will delete any messages it can find in the inbox you specify; do not use an e-mail inbox that you would like to share between applications.

POP3 and IMAP Mailboxes

Mailbox URIs are in the normal URI format:

protocol://username:password@domain

Basic IMAP Example: imap://username:password@server

Basic POP3 Example: pop3://username:password@server

Most mailboxes these days are SSL-enabled; if yours use plain SSL add +ssl to the protocol section of your URI, but for STARTTLS add +tls. Also, if your username or password include any non-ascii characters, they should be URL-encoded (for example, if your username includes an @, it should be changed to %40 in your URI).

For a verbose example, if you have an account named youremailaddress@gmail.com with a password of 1234 on GMail, which uses a IMAP server of imap.gmail.com (requiring SSL) and you would like to fetch new emails from folder named Myfolder and archive them after processing into a folder named Archived, you would enter the following as your URI:

imap+ssl://youremailaddress%40gmail.com:1234@imap.gmail.com?archive=Archived&folder=Myfolder

Additional IMAP Mailbox Features

If you are using an IMAP Mailbox, you have two additional configuration options that you can set by appending parameters to the end of your mailbox URI.

Specifying the source folder

Although by default, Django Mailbox will consume messages from your ‘INBOX’ folder, you can specify the folder from which you’d like messages consumed by specifying the folder URI query parameter; for example, to instead consume from the folder named ‘MyFolder’, you could add ?folder=MyFolder to the end of your URI:

imap+ssl://youremailaddress%40gmail.com:1234@imap.gmail.com?folder=MyFolder

Specifying an archive folder

Django Mailbox will delete messages immediately after processing them, but you can specify an IMAP folder to which the messages should be copied before the original message is deleted.

To archive email messages, add the archive folder name as a query parameter to the URI. For example, if your mailbox has a folder named myarchivefolder that you would like to copy messages to after processing, add ?archive=myarchivefolder to the end of the URI:

imap+ssl://youremailaddress%40gmail.com:1234@imap.gmail.com?archive=myarchivefolder

If you want to specifying both folder use &:

imap+ssl://youremailaddress%40gmail.com:1234@imap.gmail.com?archive=myarchivefolder&folder=MyFolder

Gmail IMAP with Oauth2 authentication

For added security, Gmail supports using OAuth2 for authentication. To handle the handshake and storing the credentials, use python-social-auth.

The Gmail Mailbox is also a regular IMAP mailbox, but the password you specify will be ignored if OAuth2 authentication succeeds. It will fall back to use your specified password as needed.

Build your URI accordingly:

gmail+ssl://youremailaddress%40gmail.com:oauth2@imap.gmail.com?archive=Archived

Local File-based Mailboxes

If you happen to want to consume a file-based mailbox like an Maildir, Mbox, Babyl, MH, or MMDF mailbox, you can use this too by entering the appropriate ‘protocol’ in the URI. If you had a maildir, for example, at /var/mail/, you would enter a URI like:

maildir:///var/mail

Note that there is an additional / in the above URI after the protocol; this is important.