mailnag won't start: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'imp'

[sebo505]

Please confirm there isn't an open report for this issue

• I have searched through bug reports

Summary

Mailnag does not start. Might be related to python updates.

I found similar reports for Manjaro and Arch.
There is also an issue on the mailnag tracker. There, someone claims that mailnag seems to be unmaintained, and that working forks exist.

I know that mailnag is working on Fedora 42. I believe they are using python 3.13 currently.

Steps to reproduce

1. run mailnag in terminal

Expected result

mailnag should start without error

Actual result

mailnag does not start with error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/mailnag", line 43, in <module>
    from Mailnag.daemon.mailnagdaemon import MailnagDaemon
  File "/usr/lib/python3.12/site-packages/Mailnag/daemon/mailnagdaemon.py", line 26, in <module>
    from Mailnag.daemon.mailchecker import MailChecker
  File "/usr/lib/python3.12/site-packages/Mailnag/daemon/mailchecker.py", line 26, in <module>
    from Mailnag.common.plugins import HookTypes
  File "/usr/lib/python3.12/site-packages/Mailnag/common/plugins.py", line 20, in <module>
    import imp
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'imp'

Environment

• Is system up to date?

Repo

Shannon (stable)

Desktop Environment

GNOME

System details

System Details Report

---

Report details

• Date generated: 2025-08-06 19:53:32

Hardware Information:

• Hardware Model: HP HP Laptop 17-cn3xxx
• Memory: 16.0 GiB
• Processor: 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-1334U × 12
• Graphics: Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics (RPL-U)
• Disk Capacity: (null)

Software Information:

• Firmware Version: F.10
• OS Name: Solus 4.7 Endurance
• OS Build: (null)
• OS Type: 64-bit
• GNOME Version: 48
• Windowing System: Wayland
• Kernel Version: Linux 6.15.6-321.current

Other comments

No response

[malfisya]

Yes, mailnag is unmaintained upstream and honestly should be deprecated. Fedora circumvent the problem by using this package, instead of patching the package heavily. We can include python-zombie-imp to solve this bug.

[sebo505]

There doesn't seem to be a good DE agnostic alternative to mailnag, and it is quite useful.
So, it would be good to keep it alive, if possible.