Retrieving the Most Recent Emails in Mail Reader Sampler

[tolgagul]

Expected behavior

The Mail Reader Sampler should retrieve the most recent n messages from the mailbox, regardless of the server's default ordering. Instead of fetching messages starting from the first received email, it should correctly fetch the last n messages by adjusting the indices in the getMessages method. This ensures that users can access the latest emails as needed.

Actual behavior

The Mail Reader Sampler retrieves messages starting from the first received email by default. This behavior aligns with the typical IMAP server ordering, where messages are numbered sequentially from the earliest to the latest. As a result, the sampler fetches older messages instead of the most recent ones, which may not meet the intended requirement of retrieving the latest n messages.

Steps to reproduce the problem

1. Configure the Mail Reader Sampler to connect to an IMAP mailbox.
2. Use the folder.getMessages(1, n) method to retrieve emails, specifying a value for n (e.g., n=5).
3. Ensure the mailbox contains more than n messages, with both old and new messages available.
4. Execute the sampler to fetch the emails.
5. Observe the retrieved messages and verify that they correspond to the oldest messages in the mailbox instead of the most recent ones.

JMeter Version

5.6.3

Java Version

openjdk version "21.0.1" 2023-10-17

OS Version

No response

[vlsi]

Frankly, I am not sure why users would expect "the recent" messages rather than "the oldest" ones.
In any case, we should not change the behaviour, as the existing scripts will start failing.

I think we could add a configuration parameter to let the users decide if they want the N recent or the N oldest messges.

[tolgagul]

Thank you for the feedback! You're absolutely right; adding a configuration parameter to let users choose between the N recent or the N oldest messages makes the feature more flexible and user-friendly. I’ll make the necessary adjustments and update the PR accordingly. Thanks again for pointing this out!

This was actually a need we identified while testing our messaging systems. For example, I sent 100 messages to a mailbox, but the last message I sent had an attachment. When I wanted to measure the response time for fetching this particular message with the attachment, I couldn't. I had to write an additional script to handle this.

[GafoorA]

Even iam facing this issue, its not fetching the latest mail, its getting the old emails..

how can we fix this ? @tolgagul