How to receive mail using python

Question

I want to receive email using python. So far I have managed to get an item, but not a body. Here is the code I used:

import poplib from email import parser pop_conn = poplib.POP3_SSL('pop.gmail.com') pop_conn.user('myusername') pop_conn.pass_('mypassword') #Get messages from server: messages = [pop_conn.retr(i) for i in range(1, len(pop_conn.list()[1]) + 1)] # Concat message pieces: messages = ["\n".join(mssg[1]) for mssg in messages] #Parse message intom an email object: messages = [parser.Parser().parsestr(mssg) for mssg in messages] for message in messages: print message['subject'] print message['body'] pop_conn.quit() 

My problem is that when I run this code, it returns the theme correctly, but not the body. Therefore, if I send an email with the subject “Tester” and the body “This is a test message”, it looks like IDLE.

 >>>>Tester >>>>None 

So, this seems to be accurately evaluating the subject, but not the body, I think this is correct in the parsing method? The problem is that I do not know enough about these libraries to figure out how to change it so that it returns both an object and a body.

Answer 1

The message of the object does not have a body, you will need to parse several parts, for example:

 for part in message.walk(): if part.get_content_type(): body = part.get_payload(decode=True) 

The walk() function iterates in depth first in parts of the email, and you are looking for parts that have a content type. Content types can be either text/plain or text/html , and sometimes one message can contain both (if the content_type message is set to multipart/alternative ).

Answer 2

The email parser returns an email.message.Message object that does not contain the body key, as you will see if you run

 print message.keys() 

You want to use the get_payload() method:

 for message in messages: print message['subject'] print message.get_payload() pop_conn.quit() 

But this is complicated when it comes to multi-part messages; get_payload() returns a list of parts, each of which is a Message object. You can get a specific part of a multi-page message using get_payload(i) , which returns the i th part, raises IndexError if i is out of range, or raises TypeError if the message is not multi-part.

As Gustavo Costa De Oliveir points out, you can use the walk() method to organize details - it performs a walk around the depth of parts and substrings of a message.

Read more about the email.parser module at http://docs.python.org/library/email.message.html#email.message.Message .

Answer 3

it is also good returned data in the correct encoding in the message contain some multilingual content

 charset = part.get_content_charset() content = part.get_payload(decode=True) content = content.decode(charset).encode('utf-8')
charset = part.get_content_charset() content = part.get_payload(decode=True) content = content.decode(charset).encode('utf-8') 

Answer 4

If you want to use IMAP4. Use the python Outlook library, download here: https://github.com/awangga/outlook to receive an unread message from your mailbox:

 import outlook mail = outlook.Outlook() mail.login(' [e-mail] ','yourpassword') mail.inbox() print mail.unread() 

To retrieve an email item:

 print mail.mailbody() print mail.mailsubject() print mail.mailfrom() print mail.mailto()