IMAP

The IMAP integration is observing your IMAP server. It can report the number of unread emails and can send a custom event that can be used to trigger an automation. Other search criteria can be used, as shown in the example below.

Configuration

To add the IMAP integration to your Home Assistant instance, use this My button:

IMAP services with App Passwords

Microsoft 365 and Live IMAP services

Microsoft has removed support for direct use (App) passwords when accessing IMAP without modern verification. You can create an App password, but access is only allowed though OAUTH2 enabled mail clients authorized by Microsoft or via an App registration in Microsoft Entra ID (school or business).

An OAUTH2 authentication flow is not supported for the IMAP integration. This means that unfortunately, it is not possible to use Home Assistant IMAP with Microsoft 365 IMAP services for school and business and the (free) personal Microsoft Live IMAP services.

Google Gmail IMAP service

If you’re going to use Gmail, 2-step verification must be enabled on your Gmail account. Once it is enabled, you need to create an App Password.

1. Go to your Google Account

2. Select Security

3. Under “How you sign into Google” select 2-Step Verification.

4. Sign in to your Account.

5. At the bottom of the 2-Step Verification page, click App Passwords.

6. Give your app a name that makes sense to you (Home Assistant IMAP, for example).

7. Click Create, then make a note of your 16-character app password for safekeeping (remove the spaces when you save it).

8. Click Done.

9. Add the IMAP Integration to your Home Assistant instance using the My button above. Enter the following information as needed:

   • Username: Your Gmail email login
   • Password: your 16-character app password (without the spaces)
   • Server: imap.gmail.com
   • Port: 993

10. Click Submit.

11. Assign your integration to an “Area” if desired, then click Finish.

Congratulations, you now have a sensor that counts the number of unread e-mails in your Gmail account. From here you can create additional sensors based upon the data that comes through the event bus when there’s a new message detected.

Configuring IMAP Searches

By default, this integration will count unread emails. By configuring the search string, you can count other results, for example:

• ALL to count all emails in a folder
• FROM, TO, SUBJECT to find emails in a folder (see IMAP RFC for all standard options)
• Gmail’s IMAP extensions allow raw Gmail searches, like X-GM-RAW "in: inbox older_than:7d" to show emails older than one week in your inbox. Note that raw Gmail searches will ignore your folder configuration and search all emails in your account!

Selecting a charset supported by the imap server

Some IMAP services, like Yahoo, require a US-ASCII charset to be configured.

Selecting message data to include in the IMAP event (advanced mode)

By default, the IMAP event won’t include text or headers message data. If you want them to be included (text or headers, or both), you have to manually select them in the option flow. Another way to process the text data, is to use the imap.fetch action. In this case, text won’t be limited by size.

Selecting an alternate SSL cipher list or disabling SSL verification (advanced mode)

If the default IMAP server settings do not work, you might try to set an alternate SSL cipher list. The SSL cipher list option allows you to select the list of SSL ciphers to be accepted from this endpoint: default (system default), modern or intermediate (inspired by Mozilla Security/Server Side TLS).

If you are using self signed certificates, you can turn off SSL verification.

Enable IMAP-Push

IMAP-Push is enabled by default if your IMAP server supports it. If you use an unreliable IMAP service that periodically drops the connection and causes issues, you might consider turning off IMAP-Push. This will fall back to polling the IMAP server.

Troubleshooting

Email providers may limit the number of reported emails. The number may be less than the limit (10,000 at least for Yahoo) even if you set the IMAP search to reduce the number of results. If you are not getting expected events and cleaning your Inbox or the configured folder is not desired, set up an email filter for the specific sender to go into a new folder. Then create a new config entry or modify the existing one with the desired folder.

Using events

When a new message arrives or a message is removed within the defined search command scope, the imap integration will send a custom event that can be used to trigger an automation. It is also possible to use to create a template binary_sensor or sensor based the event data.

The table below shows what attributes come with trigger.event.data. The data is a dictionary that has the keys that are shown below.

The attributes shown in the table are also available as variables for the custom event data template. The example shows how to use this as an event filter.

The event_type for the custom event should be set to imap_content. The configuration below shows how you can use the event data in a template sensor.

If the default maximum message size (2048 bytes) to be used in events is too small for your needs, then this maximum size setting can be increased. You need to have your profile set to advanced mode to do this.

template:
  - trigger:
      - trigger: event
        event_type: "imap_content"
        id: "custom_event"
    sensor:
      - name: imap_content
        state: "{{ trigger.event.data['subject'] }}"
        attributes:
          Entry: "{{ trigger.event.data['entry_id'] }}"
          UID: "{{ trigger.event.data['uid'] }}"
          Message: "{{ trigger.event.data['text'] }}"
          Server: "{{ trigger.event.data['server'] }}"
          Username: "{{ trigger.event.data['username'] }}"
          Search: "{{ trigger.event.data['search'] }}"
          Folder: "{{ trigger.event.data['folder'] }}"
          Sender: "{{ trigger.event.data['sender'] }}"
          Date: "{{ trigger.event.data['date'] }}"
          Subject: "{{ trigger.event.data['subject'] }}"
          Initial: "{{ trigger.event.data['initial'] }}"
          To: "{{ trigger.event.data['headers'].get('Delivered-To', ['n/a'])[0] }}"
          Return-Path: "{{ trigger.event.data['headers'].get('Return-Path',['n/a'])[0] }}"
          Received-first: "{{ trigger.event.data['headers'].get('Received',['n/a'])[0] }}"
          Received-last: "{{ trigger.event.data['headers'].get('Received',['n/a'])[-1] }}"

Actions for post-processing

The IMAP integration has some actions for post-pressing email messages. The actions are intended to be used in automations as actions after an “imap_content” event. The actions take the IMAP entry_id and the uid of the message’s event data. You can use a template for the entry_id and the uid. When the action is set up as a trigger action, you can easily select the correct entry from the UI. You will find the entry_id in YAML mode. It is highly recommended you filter the events by the entry_id.

Available actions are:

• seen: Mark the message as seen.
• move: Move the message to a target_folder and optionally mark the message seen.
• delete: Delete the message.
• fetch: Fetch the content of a message. Returns a dictionary containing "text", "subject", "sender" and "uid"". This allows to fetch and process the complete message text, not limited by size.

Example - post-processing

The example below filters the event trigger by entry_id, fetches the message and stores it in message_text. It then marks the message in the event as seen and finally, it adds a notification with the subject of the message. The seen action entry_id can be a template or literal string. In UI mode you can select the desired entry from a list as well.

alias: "imap fetch and seen example"
description: "Fetch and mark an incoming message as seen"
triggers:
  - trigger: event
    event_type: imap_content
    event_data:
      entry_id: 91fadb3617c5a3ea692aeb62d92aa869
conditions:
  - condition: template
    value_template: "{{ trigger.event.data['sender'] == '[email protected]' }}"
actions:
  - action: imap.fetch
    data:
      entry: 91fadb3617c5a3ea692aeb62d92aa869
      uid: "{{ trigger.event.data['uid'] }}"
    response_variable: message_text
  - action: imap.seen
    data:
      entry: 91fadb3617c5a3ea692aeb62d92aa869
      uid: "{{ trigger.event.data['uid'] }}"
  - action: persistent_notification.create
    data:
      message: "{{ message_text['subject'] }}"

Example - keyword spotting

The following example shows the usage of the IMAP email content sensor to scan the subject of an email for text, in this case, an email from the APC SmartConnect service, which tells whether the UPS is running on battery or not.

template:
  - trigger:
      - trigger: event
        event_type: "imap_content"
        id: "custom_event"
        event_data:
          sender: "[email protected]"
          initial: true
    sensor:
      - name: house_electricity
        state: >-
          {% if 'UPS On Battery' in trigger.event.data["subject"] %}
            power_out
          {% elif 'Power Restored' in trigger.event.data["subject"] %}
            power_on
          {% endif %}

Example - extracting formatted text from an email using template sensors

This example shows how to extract numbers or other formatted data from an email to change the value of a template sensor to a value extracted from the email. In this example, we will be extracting energy use, cost, and billed amount from an email (from Georgia Power) and putting it into sensor values using a template sensor that runs against our IMAP email sensor already set up. A sample of the body of the email used is below:

Yesterday's Energy Use:                             76 kWh
Yesterday's estimated energy cost:                  $8
Monthly Energy use-to-date for 23 days:             1860 kWh
Monthly estimated energy cost-to-date for 23 days:  $198

To view your account for details about your energy use, please click here.

Below is the template sensor which extracts the information from the body of the email in our IMAP email sensor (named sensor.energy_email) into 3 sensors for the energy use, daily cost, and billing cycle total.

template:
  - trigger:
      - trigger: event
        event_type: "imap_content"
        id: "custom_event"
        event_data:
          sender: "[email protected]"
    sensor:
      - name: "Previous Day Energy Use"
        unit_of_measurement: "kWh"
        state: >
        {{ trigger.event.data["text"]
          | regex_findall_index("\*Yesterday's Energy Use:\* ([0-9]+) kWh") }}
      - name: "Previous Day Cost"
        unit_of_measurement: "$"
        state: >
          {{ trigger.event.data["text"]
            | regex_findall_index("\*Yesterday's estimated energy cost:\* \$([0-9.]+)") }}
      - name: "Billing Cycle Total"
        unit_of_measurement: "$"
        state: >
          {{ trigger.event.data["text"]
            | regex_findall_index("\ days:\* \$([0-9.]+)") }}

By making small changes to the regular expressions defined above, a similar structure can parse other types of data out of the body text of other emails.

Example - custom event data template

We can define a custom event data template to help filter events. This can be handy if, for example, we have multiple senders we want to allow. We define the following template to return true if part of the sender is @example.com:

{{ "@example.com" in sender }}

This will render to True if the sender is allowed. The result is added to the event data as trigger.event.data["custom"].

The example below will only set the state to the subject of the email of template sensor, but only if the sender address matches.

template:
  - trigger:
      - trigger: event
        event_type: "imap_content"
        id: "custom_event"
        event_data:
          custom: True
    sensor:
      - name: event filtered by template
        state: '{{ trigger.event.data["subject"] }}'