A simple way to fetch emails in python

In today’s world, where technology has made its way into almost everything. Countries across the globe are slowly adapting to the changing atmosphere and bringing in tech at all levels of administration. So now, it has become a lot easier for us to get the information that we are looking for quickly and securely. Ranging from the status of the service request with your Internet provider to your monthly SIP investment details or credit card bill. Everything you need any info about is getting served in your email dynamically on the go.

I say it would be. Why? because,

1. We can use the dumped email text data in some text analytics projects later on.
2. We can upgrade it to send an automatic reply to the sender.
3. This may be used by business analytics teams to make use of bulk customer emails.

The idea is simple. Run an infinite polling to check for new emails, and upon receiving one scrape the mail content and store locally.

Lets first see the fragments and then at the end we can easily club them together to build the complete module. Do not try to connect the dots yet by connecting the fragmented snippets. That can be done at the end.

First, get the imports done.

	import sys
	import json
	import pickle
	import os
	import time
	import logging
	import email
	import getpass
	import imaplib

view raw mail_handler.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The connect and login part.

	self.mail_handle = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('imap.gmail.com')
	self.mail_id = username
	logging.info(f'Please provide the password:')
	rv, data = self.login()

view raw mail_handler.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The self.login() is defined as a class method and the getpass() asks for your password whenever it is invoked:

	def login(self):
	rv = None
	data = None
	try:
	rv, data = self.mail_handle.login(self.mail_id, getpass.getpass())
	except imaplib.IMAP4.error as e:
	raise PermissionError
	return rv, data # Could have been removed. Doesn't need to return anything as such

view raw mail_handler.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The processing block which goes inside an infinite loop. This block does the main job here.

Now. let’s clear the water a bit.

1. The ‘(RFC822)’ is the standard internet message exchange format.
2. The is_multipart() and walk() methods give you the different parts of an email content and let’s you walk through them respectively.
3. Here we are only interested in text content. Therefore I have put a check with get_content_type() and for all such text contents I am doing a get_payload().
4. And at the end I am dumping them into a JSON.

All these methods are then put under the class:

	class MailHandler:
	def __init__(self, username):
	self.mail_handle = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('imap.gmail.com')
	self.mail_id = username
	logging.info(f'Please provide the password:')
	rv, data = self.login()
	if rv != 'OK':
	logging.warning(f'Could not login')
	self.in_mail_start_id = 1

view raw mail_handler.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

And finally place it all in an infinite mailbox polling loop.

	def watch_inbox(self):
	while True:
	self.process_mailbox()
	time.sleep(cfg.wait)

view raw mail_handler.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Then place that under another infinite loop in the main block, which takes care of credentials.

	if __name__ == '__main__':
	current_attempt = 0
	while True:
	if current_attempt >= cfg.login_attempt:
	logging.warning(f'3 incorrect attempts')
	break
	try:
	mail_handle = MailHandler(cfg.user_mail_id)
	mail_handle.watch_inbox()
	except PermissionError as e:
	print('Incorrect credentials. ')
	current_attempt += 1

view raw mail_handler.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

That is it. Now, you can attempt to attach the snippets together and run it. This code wasn’t reviewed properly, therefore some redundant statements are still there. However, it can be modified easily and can be used accordingly.

Thank you!
Happy coding.