Recommendations on how to test code that uses Imapclient

[TonyFlury]

Fellow developers,

I am considering writing a thin email client (to display/filter emails) using ImapClient to connect to our Gmail Account - the reasons for not using IMapClient directly is to do with the custom filtering and sub-account support i want to add.

Part of our email client will necessitate filtering the emails based on sender or receiver address, and i think it would be beneficial if i could ensure that the filtering worked on actual email content (or at least mocked email content).

I know that your ImapClient testing uses a mocked imaplib to ensure that your client is making the right calls, but i need something more in depth i think.

Is there a way to extend your mocked imaplib so that it can provide 'mocked emails' - so my tests can add emails to the inbox with appropriate senders etc, and the mocked imaplib will return that email set when requested.

I am a bit of newbie when it comes to using mock but i assume such a thing is possible.

Yours,

Tony F.

[TonyFlury]

Is it possible for example to extend the imapclient.testable_imapclient to allow for the building of a 'fake' email inbox - similar to how one might use the pyfakefs to build a faked file system for testing purposes.

I will have a go myself with a fork - but is this something the developers would be interested in ?

[mjs]

You could fake an email account by monkeypatching the required IMAPClient methods (e.g. select_folder, fetch etc). This is probably easier than using the TestableIMAPClient approach which is low level and useful for checking IMAPClient's IMAP protocol behaviour.

In fact, you could implement a completely fake class for testing that has it's own implementation of the IMAPClient methods your email client uses. This could then simulate a mailbox with some messages in it.