This release also contains a few small documentation updates and packaging fixes. The NEWS file has more details.

As always, IMAPClient can be installed from PyPI (pip install imapclient) or downloaded from the IMAPClient site.

Highlights for 0.8:

• OAUTH authentication support
• IDLE support (example)
• Full NOOP support
• Comprehensive Sphinx based docs. A HTML version of the docs is included in the source distribution. They are also hosted online at http://imapclient.readthedocs.org/
• Folder rename support
• New "debug" property to simplify protocol debugging
• Live test and interactive shell features are now part of the imapclient Python package and can be called from the command-line. (For example: python -m imapclient.interact ...)
• New normalise_times attribute allows caller to select whether datetimes returned by fetch() are native or not
• interactive shell now works with both IPython 0.10 and 0.11 (and later)
• BODY/BODYSTRUCTURE parsing fixes
• Programmer friendly version information now available (imapclient.version_info)

The NEWS file and main documentation has more details on all of the above.

As always, IMAPClient can be installed from PyPI (pip install imapclient) or downloaded from the IMAPClient site.

My domain is up for renewal soon and I recently received a very official looking letter from a company called Domain Renewal Group. On the surface it looks like a renewal notice from my registrar but if you read more closely mention that the letter "isn't an invoice" and that if you return the form and pay them you'd be transferring the domain from your current registrar to them. Never mind that the price they're asking is almost 5 times higher than what my actual register wants for an annual renewal.

I bet this catches plenty of people out - that's what their business model depends on. Bottom feeding scum.

Plenty of others have blogged about these guys as well, but I thought I'd add my voice. As more people learn about these kinds of scams they become less effective.

This release is earlier then planned because IMAPClient is featured in the IMAP chapter of Brandon Rhodes' new edition of the book Foundations of Python Network Programming. Brandon had made several bug reports and feature requests while working on the book and some of the examples in the book relied on unreleased changes to IMAPClient. IMAPClient 0.7 works with book's examples.

What this does mean is that IMAPClient 0.7 doesn't have Python 3 support. I have been making headway with this however and with a little luck and a little more time, 0.8 should be Python 3 compatible.

Highlights for 0.7:

• BODY and BODYSTRUCTURE FETCH response parsing was fixed. Previously, the object returned for multipart messages was difficult to deal with reliably (and not really correct). Existing code that makes BODY/BODYSTRUCTURE FETCH requests with IMAPClient may need to be updated.
• the live test scripts and the unit tests have been converted to use the excellent unittest2 framework. This makes writing tests easier, improves test failure output and, for the live tests, provides significant improvement over the previous crude test script.
• livetest.py now takes an INI file for the IMAP account parameters to test against instead of requiring that they are passed on command line.
• support for the NAMESPACE command IMAP added
• fetch() now supports optional modifiers. These are required for extensions such as RFC 4551 (conditional store). Thanks to Thomas Jost for the patch.
• the live tests now work with the FastMail.fm IMAP implementation. Some special casing was required for some tests.

The NEWS document has more details on all the above.

Proper documentation is also on its way. I've been slowly making headway with Sphinx based documentation.

As always, IMAPClient can be installed from PyPI (pip install imapclient) or downloaded from the IMAPClient site.

Also, IMAPClient now uses the excellent Distribute instead of setuptools.

As always, IMAPClient can be installed from PyPI (pip install imapclient) or downloaded from the IMAPClient site.

In the pipeline now is better (Sphinx based) documentation, cleaning up the tests, OAUTH support and Python 3 support.

The only functional change in the release is that it now automatically patches imaplib's IMAP4_SSL class to fix Python Issue 5949. This is a bug that's been fixed in later Python 2.6 versions and 2.7 but still exists in Python versions that are in common use. Without fix this you may experience hangs when using SSL.

The patch is only applied if the running Python version is known to be one of the affected versions. It is applied when IMAPClient is imported.

The only other change in this release is that I've now marked IMAPClient as "production ready" on PyPI and have updated the README to match. This was prompted by a request to clarify the current status of the project and seeing that all current functionality is solid and, I don't plan to change the existing APIs in backwards-incompatible ways, I've decided to indicate the project as suitable for production use.

As always, IMAPClient can be installed from PyPI (pip install imapclient) or downloaded from the IMAPClient site. Feedback, bug reports and patches are most welcome.

• Completely new response parsing code. Complex response items like BODYSTRUCTURE and ENVELOPE are now handled properly and interaction with the Gmail and MS Exchange IMAP implementations works correctly.
• Support for the COPY command
• Support for the XLIST extension (used by Gmail)
• select_folder() now returns a parsed response containing all reported details about the selected folder.
• the return value from list_folders(), list_sub_folders() and xlist_folders() now include the IMAP folder flags and folder delimiter.
• Handling of internationalised folder names has been cleaned up. Folder names now are always returned as unicode strings.
• Many bug fixes.

Be aware that there have been several API changes with this release. See the NEWS file for further details.

IMAPClient can be installed from PyPI (pip install imapclient) or downloaded from the IMAPClient site. As always, feedback, bug reports and patches are most welcome.

Special thanks goes to Mark Hammond. He has contributed a significant amount of code and effort to this release. Incidentally, Mark is using IMAPClient as part of the backend for the Raindrop Mozilla Labs project.

So far I've found that "attached", "attachment" and "CV" all trigger the reminder. It's been well thought out in that it is visually obvious but doesn't get in the way and doesn't steal focus.

Thanks Thunderbird developers. I'm sure this will save me more than once.

A simple example that triggers the warning:

class MyClass(object):

    def __new__(cls, a, b):
        print 'MyClass.__new__', a, b
        return super(MyClass, cls).__new__(cls, a, b)

    def __init__(self, a, b):
        print 'MyClass.__init__', a, b
        super(MyClass, self).__init__(a, b)

obj = MyClass(6, 7)

This gives:

$ python2.4 simple-warning.py
MyClass.__new__ 6 7
MyClass.__init__ 6 7

$ python2.6 simple-warning.py
MyClass.__new__ 6 7
simple-warning.py:5: DeprecationWarning: object.__new__() takes no parameters
  return super(MyClass, cls).__new__(cls, a, b)
MyClass.__init__ 6 7
simple-warning.py:9: DeprecationWarning: object.__init__() takes no parameters
  super(MyClass, self).__init__(a, b)

It turns out that a change to Python for 2.6 (and 3) means that object.__new__ and object.__init__ no longer take arguments - a TypeError is raised when arguments are passed. To avoid breaking too much pre-existing code, there is a special case that will cause a DeprecationWarning instead of TypeError if both __init__ and __new__ are overridden. This is the case we were running into with our code at work.

The reason for this change seems to make enough sense: object doesn't do anything with arguments to __init__ and __new__ so it shouldn't accept them. Raising an error when arguments are passed highlights code where the code might be doing the wrong thing.

Unfortunately this change also breaks Python's multiple inheritance in a fairly serious way when cooperative super calls are used. Looking at the ticket for this change, this issue was thought about but perhaps the implications were not fully understood. Given that using super with multiple inheritance is common and "correct" practice, it would seem that this change to Python is a step backwards.