Based on the good initial coverage over here.

Implementation of multimap based on lists, dicts, or sets using Python 2.5 defaultdict.

Removes ">From" and "From " lines from mail headers.

Thunderbird adds invalid mail headers to it's local folders. Cyrus IMAP is strict about them. This script walks through all files in the given directories and removes any line that starts with ">From" or "From " (note the space and no colon).

Requires Python 2.5+.

This python script monitors the IMAP mail server for the given account and moves the mails with attachments to "Downloadedmails" folder in server after downloading the attachments to the individual directories on localmachine with the timestamp.

This script was written before I found out about the Cyrus "ipurge" command. It connects to a Cyrus IMAP server as the administrator, finds all Trash folders and deletes all messages older than 1 day based on the Received date. Requires JavaMail's mail.jar and activation.jar in the classpath.

Ever been frustrated at having to separately read data and then do minor processing by calling methods on the data? Find yourself writing lambda functions or short generators to do intermediate processing between iterators? If so, you can simplify your programming life by using imapmethod instead. Imapmethod calls a named method on each item it iterates through. For example, you can replace [x.rstrip() for x in iterable], which inefficiently generates the whole list at once before processing begins, or the more efficient imap(lambda x: x.rstrip(), iterable) with imapmethod("rstrip", iterable) or even the provided irstrip(iterable).

This recipe also illustrates some more brain-twisting uses of itertools.

Polls an IMAP inbox for unread messages and displays the sender and subject in a scrollable window using Tkinter.

Reads servername, user, and password from ~/.imap file. They must be on one line, separated with spaces.