New submission from Макс Вернер mvarnar@gmail.com:

An example of fetching messages from the mailbox given in "IMAP4 Example" section is incorrect:

typ, data = M.fetch(num, '(RFC822)') print('Message %s\n%s\n' % (num, data[0][1]))

"fetch" may return server data that was not requested (see "7.4.2. FETCH Response" section of RFC 3501). In that case "data[0][1]" won't return what user expects. This is a bad example, that many people repeat and advise to other developers: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13210737/get-only-new-emails-imaplib-and... https://gist.github.com/robulouski/7441883 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51098962/check-if-email-inbox-is-empty-i... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21116498/imaplib-not-getting-all-emails-... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2230037/how-to-fetch-an-email-body-using...

I guess, this peculiarity should be clarified in the documentation. I offer to mark this fetching method is not safe and requests careful fetch result parsing.

---------- assignee: docs@python components: Documentation, email messages: 334048 nosy: barry, docs@python, r.david.murray, Макс Вернер priority: normal severity: normal status: open title: incorrect example of fetching messages in imaplib documentation type: enhancement versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.5, Python 3.6, Python 3.7, Python 3.8

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