One of the simplest forms of hardware output that we can add to a program is an LED attached to a GPIO pin. We've already blinked LEDs, but not in a way that conveyed any sort of meaningful information; so first things first, we'll need something to communicate to the user. Here's a simple program that uses Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) to login to your email account and retrieve the number of unread messages in your inbox. Save it as a new file called email_counter.py, either in Cloud9 or your editor of choice over SSH, filling in the IMAP details for your account, as shown in the following code:
import imaplib
IMAP_host = "imap.gmail.com"
IMAP_email = "username@gmail.com"
IMAP_pass = "password"
email = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(IMAP_host)
def connect():
email.login(IMAP_email, IMAP_pass)
def disconnect():
email.close()
email.logout()
def get_num_emails():
email.select("INBOX")
ret, data = email.search(None, "UNSEEN")
return len(data[0].split(...
