One of the simplest forms of hardware output that we can add to a program is an LED attached to a GPIO pin. We've already blinked LEDs, but not in a way that conveyed any sort of meaningful information; so first things first, we'll need something to communicate to the user. Here's a simple program that uses Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) to login to your email account and retrieve the number of unread messages in your inbox. Save it as a new file called email_counter.py, either in Cloud9 or your editor of choice over SSH, filling in the IMAP details for your account, as shown in the following code:

import imaplib

IMAP_host = "imap.gmail.com"
IMAP_email = "[email protected]"
IMAP_pass = "password"

email = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(IMAP_host)

def connect():
    email.login(IMAP_email, IMAP_pass)

def disconnect():
    email.close()
    email.logout()

def get_num_emails():
    email.select("INBOX")
    ret, data = email.search(None, "UNSEEN")
    return len(data[0].split(...