Check if there’s unread email in a gmail account

I needed an easy way to check if there’s unread email in a gmail account.

import lxml.etree
import requests

def check_for_new_mail(user, password):
    """Check a gmail atom feed for new email"""
    response = requests.get('https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom',
                         auth=(user, password))
    ns = {"feed": "http://purl.org/atom/ns#"}
    xml = lxml.etree.fromstring(str(response.text))
    return len(xml.xpath('//feed:entry', namespaces=ns)) > 0

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