Parse Gmail with Python and mark all older than date as "read"

Question

Long story short, I created a new gmail account, and linked several other accounts to it (each with 1000s of messages), which I am importing. All imported messages arrive as unread, but I need them to appear as read.

I have a little experience with python, but I've only used mail and imaplib modules for sending mail, not processing accounts.

Is there a way to bulk process all items in an inbox, and simply mark messages older than a specified date as read?

Answer 1

Rather than try to parse our HTML why not just use the IMAP interface? Hook it up to a standard mail client and then just sort by date and mark whichever ones you want as read.

Answer 2

Just go to the Gmail web interface, do an advanced search by date, then select all and mark as read.

Answer 3

typ, data = M.search(None, 'BEFORE 01/01/2009')
for num in data[0].split():
   M.store(num, '+FLAGS', '\\Seen')

This is a slight modification of the code in the imaplib doc page for the store method. I found the search criteria to use from RFC 3501. I haven't actually run the code so there may be some issues, most likely with the date format. This should get you started.