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+Introducing weighmail
+#####################
+
+:date: 2012-05-24 19:30
+:tags: Python, Gmail, IMAPClient, weighmail
+:slug: introducing-weighmail
+:author: Brian Neal
+
+Recently my wife approached me and told me that Gmail was warning her that she
+was using 95% of her (free) quota. This was a bit surprising, but my wife does a
+lot of photography, and sends lots of photos through the mail to various people.
+So I began helping her trying to find her large messages. It was then that I
+learned that Gmail provides no easy way to do this. You can't sort by size. You
+can search for specific attachments, for example .psd or .jpg, and that is what
+she ended up doing.
+
+Surely I thought there must be an easier way. I thought that perhaps Gmail might
+have an API like their other products. A bit of searching turned up that the
+only API to Gmail is IMAP_. I didn't know anything about IMAP, but I do know
+some Python. And sure enough, Python has a library for IMAP called imaplib_.
+Glancing through imaplib I got the impression it was a very low-level library
+and I began to get a bit discouraged.
+
+I continued doing some searching and I quickly found IMAPClient_, a high-level
+and friendlier library for working with IMAP. This looked like it could work
+very well for me!
+
+I started thinking about writing an application to find big messages in a Gmail
+account. The most obvious and natural way to flag large messages would be to
+slap a Gmail label on them. But could IMAPClient do this? It didn't look like
+it. It turns out that labels are part of a set of `custom Gmail IMAP
+extensions`_, and IMAPClient didn't support them. Yet.
+
+I contacted the author of IMAPClient, `Menno Smits`_, and quickly learned he is
+a very friendly and encouraging guy. I decided to volunteer a patch, as this
+would give me a chance to learn something about IMAP. He readily agreed and I
+dove in. 
+
+The short version of the story is I learned a heck of a lot from reading the
+source to IMAPClient, and was able to contribute a patch for Gmail label support
+and even some tests!
+
+After the patch was accepted I went to work on my application, which I have
+dubbed weighmail_. I was even able to figure out how to put `weighmail up on
+PyPI`_ thanks to Menno's example.
+
+So if you need a program to categorize your Gmail by message size, I hope
+weighmail will meet your needs. Please try it out and feel free to send me
+feedback and feature requests on the Bitbucket issue tracker.
+
+I have used it maybe a half-dozen times on my Gmail account now.  My Gmail
+account is only about 26% full and I have about 26,300 messages in my "All Mail"
+folder. Run times for weighmail have varied from six to 15 minutes when adding 3
+label categories for size. I was (and am) kind of worried that Gmail may lock me
+out of my account for accessing it too heavily, but knock on wood it hasn't yet.
+Perhaps they rate limit the responses and that is why the run times vary so
+much.
+
+In any event, I hope you find it useful. A big thank you to Menno Smits for his
+IMAPClient library, his advice, and working with me on the patch. Hooray for
+open source!
+
+.. _IMAP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Message_Access_Protocol
+.. _imaplib: http://docs.python.org/library/imaplib.html
+.. _IMAPClient: http://imapclient.freshfoo.com/ 
+.. _custom Gmail IMAP extensions: https://developers.google.com/google-apps/gmail/imap_extensions
+.. _weighmail: https://bitbucket.org/bgneal/weighmail/
+.. _weighmail up on PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/weighmail/0.1.0
+.. _Menno Smits: http://freshfoo.com/blog/