Is there some way to grab a single message from an IMAP server with a shell script? I'd prefer to avoid "scraping" an IMAP protocol session and instead use something like wget ... with some clever options.

The second half of this question involves specification of the message that I want to retrieve. Learning a specific "message number" is messy. I will likely know the TO: and maybe the FROM: details. I might also know the SUBJECT: I'm eager for your suggestions here as well.

Merci d'avance,
~~~ 0;-Dan

Maybe use telnet and grab the raw data? If you would do it that way, you could possibly grep and awk for a specific pattern or string.

Yeah. That telnet and raw data stuff is what I called "scraping." I was hoping that there was some 'wget' or similar one-time good-deal trick.

~~~ 0;-Dan

Oh my bad, I didn't understand the meaning of that word. I would rather use awk and grep, so I don't know of a way to my knowledge about using grep for that, mainly because I never mess with IMAP servers.

Dan,

wget won't help you here because it doesn't speak the IMAP protocol. The basic steps you will have to follow are

• Log into the email server
• Download the headers for each message.
• Search for the message you are interested in.
• Download the body of the message of interest.

Netcat would probably be a cleaner option than telnet. Another option would be writing a script in a language like PHP, Python or Perl. Those languages all have IMAP libraries that would make the job easier.

Do you have shell access to the IMAP server? If so, what type of server is it: cyrus, courier, etc? In most cases, your messages will be stored in plain text anyway, and you could just grep the file(s) on the server's filesystem.

Regards,
Ben