title: IMAP mailboxes
agents: active
catalog: agentless
license: GPL
distribution: check_mk
description:
 This active check logs into an imap account and can monitor the age of the oldest or
 newest mail as well as the total count of mails in one or multiple mailboxes.

 There is a caveat though: Many mailservers don't support retrieving mails sorted by
 age and it would be very costy (in terms of traffic and check time) to retrive all
 mails. To work around this, the check retrieves a configurable number of the least
 recently and most recently modified mails from the server and checks the age of those.
 Unless mails get moved between mailboxes, the least recenly modified mail should also
 be the oldest one and the most recently modified mail should be the newest.
