@rezocharly by default it shows unseen emails. Just checking there are unseen emails in the root of the inbox you are showing? It helped me to write a little email program based on the code example of mscdex . Put it e.g in em.js in email folder and run it with node em.js If you add debug: console.log, to the imap config section in the em.js, you get a good overview of what is happening.