Long story short, search is challenging for generic IMAP accounts. It’s probably not the answer you were hoping for, but hopefully it gives you a good idea of the challenges we are facing and the tradeoffs we must make as a small company who wants to provide a feature-rich application that‘s also cost-effective (both for us and our customers).

 

An IMAP extension we know that can significantly improve search is SEARCH=FUZZY:

 

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6203

 

Unfortunately few independent email providers support it, at least by default. Some providers run installations of Dovecot that support SEARCH=FUZZY but those are rare. Dovecot is the most popular IMAP software. It supports SEARCH=FUZZY since version 2.1, but the extension must be manually enabled:

 

https://imapwiki.org/Specs

https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/protocols/imap_server/

https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/fts/

 

These links are the relevant documentation pages you could send to your hosting provider as reference.

import imaplib
import pprint
import timeit

imap_host = 'mail.example.com'
imap_user = 'email@email.com'
imap_pass = 'password for email'

    # connect to host using SSL
imap = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(imap_host)
imap.login(imap_user, imap_pass)

def imapconnection():

   

    imap.select('Inbox')

    tmp, data = imap.search(None,'FROM' , 'emailtosearchfor@gmail.com')
    for num in data[0].split():
        tmp, data = imap.fetch(num, '(RFC822)')
        #print('Message: {0}\n'.format(num))
        #pprint.pprint(data[0][1])
        break
  

#save the execution time to a list
execution_time_list = []
i = 0
while i < 100:
    execution_time = timeit.timeit(imapconnection, number=1)
    execution_time_list.append(execution_time)
    i += 1


#print the average execution time from the list
print(sum(execution_time_list)/len(execution_time_list))

imap.close()

imap = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(imap_host)

imap = imaplib.IMAP4(imap_host)
imap.starttls()