Download a specific email from Gmail using Python

Question

Can someone help me customize an existing code sample?

I can see from the following article how to connect to gmail and download content, but I can\'t figure out how to

Answer 1

I suggest using IMAPClient as it papers over many of the more esoteric aspects of IMAP.

The following snippet will pull messages based on your criteria, parse the message strings to email.message.Message instances and print the Date and From headers.

from datetime import datetime, timedelta
import email
from imapclient import IMAPClient

HOST = 'imap.gmail.com'
USERNAME = 'username'
PASSWORD = 'password'
ssl = True

today = datetime.today()
cutoff = today - timedelta(days=5)

## Connect, login and select the INBOX
server = IMAPClient(HOST, use_uid=True, ssl=ssl)
server.login(USERNAME, PASSWORD)
select_info = server.select_folder('INBOX')

## Search for relevant messages
## see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501#section-6.4.5
messages = server.search(
    ['FROM "Alerts@foobank.com"', 'SINCE %s' % cutoff.strftime('%d-%b-%Y')])
response = server.fetch(messages, ['RFC822'])

for msgid, data in response.iteritems():
    msg_string = data['RFC822']
    msg = email.message_from_string(msg_string)
    print 'ID %d: From: %s Date: %s' % (msgid, msg['From'], msg['date'])