How can I download all emails with attachments from Gmail?
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.
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
I'm not an expert on Perl, but what I do know is that GMail supports IMAP and POP3, 2 protocols that are completely standard and allow you to do just that.
Maybe that helps you to get started.
#!/usr/bin/env python
"""Save all attachments for given gmail account."""
import os, sys
from libgmail import GmailAccount
ga = GmailAccount("[email protected]", "pA$$w0Rd_")
ga.login()
# folders: inbox, starred, all, drafts, sent, spam
for thread in ga.getMessagesByFolder('all', allPages=True):
for msg in thread:
sys.stdout.write('.')
if msg.attachments:
print "\n", msg.id, msg.number, msg.subject, msg.sender
for att in msg.attachments:
if att.filename and att.content:
attdir = os.path.join(thread.id, msg.id)
if not os.path.isdir(attdir):
os.makedirs(attdir)
with open(os.path.join(attdir, att.filename), 'wb') as f:
f.write(att.content)
untested
- Make sure TOS allows such scripts otherwise you account will be suspended
- There might be better options: GMail offline mode, Thunderbird + ExtractExtensions, GmailFS, Gmail Drive, etc.