Instead of using POP3, you can also use IMAP to retrieve the e-mail message from your Google account. In this case, the message won't be deleted after retrieval.
To run this recipe, you should have an e-mail account with Google or any other service provider.
Let us connect to your Google e-mail account and read the first e-mail message. If you don't delete it, the first e-mail message would be the welcome message from Google.
Listing 5.5 shows us how to check Google e-mail with IMAP as follows:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# Python Network Programming Cookbook -- Chapter – 5
# This program is optimized for Python 2.7.
# It may run on any other version with/without modifications.
import argparse
import getpass
import imaplib
GOOGLE_IMAP_SERVER = 'imap.googlemail.com'
def check_email(username):
mailbox = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(GOOGLE_IMAP_SERVER, '993')
password = getpass.getpass(prompt="Enter you Google password: ")
mailbox.login(username, password)
mailbox.select('Inbox')
typ, data = mailbox.search(None, 'ALL')
for num in data[0].split():
typ, data = mailbox.fetch(num, '(RFC822)')
print 'Message %s
%s
' % (num, data[0][1])
break
mailbox.close()
mailbox.logout()
if __name__ == '__main__':
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Email Download Example')
parser.add_argument('--username', action="store", dest="username", default=getpass.getuser())
given_args = parser.parse_args()
username = given_args.username
check_email(username)If you run this script, this will show the following output. In order to remove the private part of the data, we truncated some user data.
$$ python 5_5_check_remote_email_via_imap.py --username=<USER_NAME> Enter your Google password: Message 1 Received: by 10.140.142.16; Sat, 17 Nov 2007 09:26:31 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <...>@mail.gmail.com> Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2007 09:26:31 -0800 From: "Gmail Team" <[email protected]> To: "<User Full Name>" <USER_NAME>@gmail.com> Subject: Gmail is different. Here's what you need to know. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_Part_7453_30339499.1195320391988" ------=_Part_7453_30339499.1195320391988 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Messages that are easy to find, an inbox that organizes itself, great spam-fighting tools and built-in chat. Sound cool? Welcome to Gmail. To get started, you may want to: [TRUNCATED]
The preceding script takes a Google username from the command line and calls the check_email() function. This function creates an IMAP mailbox with the IMAP4_SSL() class of imaplib, which is initialized with Google's IMAP server and default port.
Then, this function logs in to the mailbox with a password, which is captured by the getpass() method of the getpass module. The inbox folder is selected by calling the select() method on the mailbox object.
The mailbox object has many useful methods. Two of them are search() and fetch() that are used to get the first e-mail message. Finally, it's safer to call the close() and logout() method on the mailbox object to end the IMAP connection.