IMAP Email Feed

This component is in development - it is not production ready. Please contact us if you are interested in setting this up in your IguanaX environment.

It all begins here. This component will connect via the IMAP protocol (see IMAP Concepts for a brief overview), and in sequence download emails from your email account and queue the messages as it does so.

Add an IMAP Email Feed Component using +COMPONENT

See Create a Component if you need a refresher.

Set up a gmail APP password - assuming your email provider is Google

Sign in to your Google Account: You need to log into your Google account. Make sure you are using the account for which you want to create an app password.

Turn on 2-Step Verification (if not already enabled):

Go to your Google Account.
Click on the "Security" tab.
Under "Signing in to Google," find "2-Step Verification" and click on it.
Follow the steps to turn on 2-Step Verification. This may involve providing your phone number for verification.

Create an App Password:

Easiest way to find it is to search for app in your Google account:

Create an App Password for IguanaX:

Then copy this app password into the password field of the IMAP Email Feed component

Put in your email address and password into the IMAP Email Feed component card

Use your email address. Some email providers like Google will require you use a APP password - see the previous section.

Link up a downstream component

See Linking components. The component is downloading emails and putting them into the queue for the component.

See How to push messages into a queue?

Click START! Now you have a stream of emails being fed into your queue

The fun begins now! There is so much that you can do with access to email in a convenient environment like Iguana.

Custom status shows the progress the feed is making

I implemented Custom Status using the STAT Library. It’s really quite lovely being able to see the real time status of the feed component. Currently this is displaying the range that is being loaded and what the end point is. I have so much spam in my inbox ugh….

We can configure where the feed is starting from using the NextMailId field

If you look carefully you’ll notice that this field increments as the component is running:

The feeder makes use of the COUNT Library which makes it easy run the component for a short batch of emails and schedule another run. This is a very common technique for building Feeder interfaces.

What concepts are used to build this adapter?

The IMAP Library is used to interact with the email server using a pure Lua implementation of the IMAP protocol. We use Meta tables to make this little IMAP adapter with methods.

Reading and writing in larger chunks of data is much faster is important in understanding performance - how to make the IMAP feed process faster.

Pretty cool! I coded the whole thing from scratch in Lua together with the Email Filter in some spare time this week. It’s implemented purely in Lua. There are no limits of what you can do with IguanaX. Are you ready to take control of your data?