Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

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Writing a feature-complete and fully functioning IMAP client is a standalone project that is outside the scope of this book.

IMAP is a complex protocol that includes support for flags, searching, and many more features. Most of these commands are provided by imaplib and it's also possible to upload messages to the server or create tools to perform backups or copy messages from one mail account to another.

Also, when parsing complex emails, the email module will handle the various representation of data specified by the email-related RFCs, for example, our recipe returns dates as a string, but email.utils.parsedate can parse them to Python objects.