Our current imaplib implementation lacks quite a few of tests and the ones present are written in different styles. I'd like to propose rewriting the test case with this new style I've developed during PyCon sprints along with David. Once we'll have the entire test suite in place it'll be safer to introduce any changes I'd like to cover, including updating the implementation to newest RFC 3501 version.

I've just found the original issue where I wanted to submit the new tests. I'm closing this in favor of http://bugs.python.org/issue22137.

I'm reopening this issue per discussion with David we've had on IRC. The scope of this issue to refactor current tests to make them more readable and clean. The most important work is:
1. having single _setup method 
2. the _setup method should addClenup to clean the environment
3. have stubs with implemented mostly used methods, all others should be implemented ad-hoc in test methods
4. use unittest.main() for running tests

We'll do it along current tests to show the improvement. Once we reach satisfactory level we will remove the old tests. This issue is to show this progress.

David can you please take a look once more, I've applied all the changes you've asked for. I'm currently working on adding the existing tests rewritten to use the new framework so it's easy to compare. It's still in progress but the general idea should maintain.

David I think I've re-implemented, using the new style, all the methods from ThreadedNetworkedTests and ThreadedNetworkedTestsSSL, the new classes are NewIMAPTests and NewIMAPSSLTests accordingly.

David I'm uploading the patch with all the review comments addressed. The changes from just the review can be seen here: https://bitbucket.org/soltysh/cpython/commits/91708e0c6e7c5230bd69b1135b82ef47b6dc4d43?at=default (please ignore the changes to test_logincapa_withclient_certfile, these are not part of the final patch).

Reitveld can diff patchsets, so I used that for review.

Thanks, I'll try to update the patch in the following days.

David I apologize for 2 emails from Reitveld, for some reason it didn't show me all in one view :/ (I need to master Reitveld better). I've just updated patch according to your comments.

Revised patch LGTM.  Once 3.6 is out the door I'll commit it, though you may need to remind me.

Thank you David, of course I'll remind you :)

New changeset 75f9cca86fa1 by R David Murray in branch '3.5':
#25591: improve imap tests.
https://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/75f9cca86fa1

New changeset 4663466b0d66 by R David Murray in branch '3.6':
Merge: #25591: improve imap tests.
https://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/4663466b0d66

New changeset 93d8cce449eb by R David Murray in branch 'default':
Merge: #25591: improve imap tests.
https://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/93d8cce449eb

Committed.  FYI, I did have to make a few tweaks.  There were several lines longer than 80 characters still that I wrapped.  The tests failed with -W error:BytesWarning, something I normally run the tests with.  That required a fix to the library (a decode on the error message...if anyone is depending on the error message being bytes instead of string I'm sorry, but I doubt anyone is.  And finally, committing to 3.6 required adding the 'r' prefix to some of the tests regexes to eliminate the invalid escape warnings.

Thanks for your patience and persistence, Maciej.

New changeset a10d6ab65b23 by Victor Stinner in branch '3.5':
Issue #25591: Fix test_imaplib if ssl miss
https://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/a10d6ab65b23