Question

How do I connect to Gmail and determine which messages have attachments? I then want to download each attachment, printing out the Subject: and From: for each message as I process it.

Answer 1

Hard one 🙂

import email, getpass, imaplib, os  detach_dir = '.' # directory where to save attachments (default: current) user = raw_input('Enter your GMail username:') pwd = getpass.getpass('Enter your password: ')  # connecting to the gmail imap server m = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('imap.gmail.com') m.login(user,pwd) m.select('[Gmail]/All Mail') # here you a can choose a mail box like INBOX instead # use m.list() to get all the mailboxes  resp, items = m.search(None, 'ALL') # you could filter using the IMAP rules here (check http://www.example-code.com/csharp/imap-search-critera.asp) items = items[0].split() # getting the mails id  for emailid in items:     resp, data = m.fetch(emailid, '(RFC822)') # fetching the mail, '`(RFC822)`' means 'get the whole stuff', but you can ask for headers only, etc     email_body = data[0][1] # getting the mail content     mail = email.message_from_string(email_body) # parsing the mail content to get a mail object      #Check if any attachments at all     if mail.get_content_maintype() != 'multipart':         continue      print '['+mail['From']+'] :' + mail['Subject']      # we use walk to create a generator so we can iterate on the parts and forget about the recursive headach     for part in mail.walk():         # multipart are just containers, so we skip them         if part.get_content_maintype() == 'multipart':             continue          # is this part an attachment ?         if part.get('Content-Disposition') is None:             continue          filename = part.get_filename()         counter = 1          # if there is no filename, we create one with a counter to avoid duplicates         if not filename:             filename = 'part-%03d%s' % (counter, 'bin')             counter += 1          att_path = os.path.join(detach_dir, filename)          #Check if its already there         if not os.path.isfile(att_path) :             # finally write the stuff             fp = open(att_path, 'wb')             fp.write(part.get_payload(decode=True))             fp.close() 

Wowww! That was something. 😉 But try the same in Java, just for fun!

By the way, I tested that in a shell, so some errors likely remain.

Enjoy

EDIT:

Because mail-box names can change from one country to another, I recommend doing m.list() and picking an item in it before m.select('the mailbox name') to avoid this error:

imaplib.error: command SEARCH illegal in state AUTH, only allowed in states SELECTED