Download all attachments from an IMAP folder

Question

I have an IMAP folder somewhere containing thousands of attached files.

How to download all of these attachments?

• A program focused on this task is preferred, not a human-facing email reading/composing program that happens to also download attachments if you click here and there
• Command-line tool preferred
• Free, ideally open source

Answer 1

You could do this with a python script, the following example would download and print the text from all messages, (courtesy of the python documents).

import getpass, imaplib

M = imaplib.IMAP4()
M.login(getpass.getuser(), getpass.getpass())
M.select()
typ, data = M.search(None, 'ALL')
for num in data[0].split():
    typ, data = M.fetch(num, '(RFC822)')
    print 'Message %s\n%s\n' % (num, data[0][3])
M.close()
M.logout()

But in your case you need to specify the attachments as in this SO answer, (second one looks to fill your needs).

• Free
• Command Line
• Customisable
• Open Source
• Just about any platform from Raspberry Pi to a super computer cluster even OS-X or Windows

Answer 2

Mozilla Thunderbird has an attachment extractor addon which can be instructed to extract attachments from an entire IMAP folder at once. It also can remove attachments from e-mails after extraction to save space (which is the main reason I extract attachments).