Get mailboxes

In order to deal with mails and mailboxes, you need to get mailboxes names (path).

If you know them (like INBOX, Sent, Trash, ...), you don't need to get mailboxes and can skip this step.

Getting mailboxes

You can get mailboxes simply with this code :

ESM

import Imap from 'imap-mailbox';
import { config } from './imap-config'; // ImapConfig

const imap = new Imap(config);
await imap.start(); // Connect to IMAP server

const mailboxes = await imap.getMailboxes();

console.log(mailboxes); // Log a map of Mailbox objects

CJS

const Imap = require('imap-mailbox').default;
const { config } = require('./imap-config'); // ImapConfig

async function run() {
    const imap = new Imap(config);
    await imap.start(); // Connect to IMAP server

    const mailboxes = await imap.getMailboxes();

    console.log(mailboxes); // Log a map of Mailbox objects
}

run();

Variable mailboxes contains Mailbox objects, where you can use Mailbox.path to get a mailbox name (path).

danger

Always wait for await imap.start() before any operation on Imap object (except for imap.on() method).

Now that you have the name of your mailboxes, you can get mails from them.

We will see that in the next step.