Some time ago I ve written a Python script, using poplib library, which retrieves messages from my pop3 email account. Now I would like to use it to retrieve emails from different mail server which works with IMAP. It works well, but only to retrieve messages from Inbox. Is there any way to also get emails from other folders like Spam, Sent etc? I know I could use imaplib and rewrite the script, but my questions is if it's possible to obtain that with poplib.
No.
POP is a single folder protocol. It is very simple and was not designed for multiple folders.
You will need to use IMAP or other advanced protocols to access additional folders.
Related
I am trying to automate emails using python. Unfortunately, the network administrators at my work have blocked SMTP relay, so I cannot use that approach to send the emails (they are addressed externally).
I am therefore using win32com to automatically send these emails via outlook. This is working fine except for one thing. I want to choose the "FROM" field within my python code, but I simply cannot figure out how to do this.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
If you configured a separate POP3/SMTP account, set the MailItem.SendUsingAccount property to an account from the Namespace.Accounts collection.
If you are sending on behalf of an Exchange user, set the MailItem.SentOnBehalfOfName property
I am trying to fetch mails from another mailbox (xxx#domail.com or xxx#gmail.com) in google-app-engine.
I don't want to read mails from appspotmail box as it is being used for different purpose.
Is there any efficient way in which i can make this happen.
Two options:
You could read an inbox via POP/IMAP, but this requires a bit of coding. You also need to have Outgoing Sockets API enabled, which requires you to have a paid app. This approach is async, which means you will constantly need to poll for new messages.
Forward emails to a new appspotmail address (you can have many). This is pretty easy, especially since you already process incoming emails. Since you can have multiple accounts, e.g. xyz#yourappid.appspotmail.com, you can distinguish between them in code.
You can use imap+oauth to read email from a google address. If you google it the very first result is what you need. https://developers.google.com/gmail/oauth_overview
My problem is what's the best strategy for periodically checking a local email account to find if there is any new message(if any, then send these messages to some function to process)?
While during development, we use a Gmail account, so we use a periodic celery task to check the gmail account (through IMAP), and process the emails if there is any.
Now if we implement the mail server by ourselves, shall I still IMAP to the server, or I can just read the files under Maildir? Which is the preferred way?
Actually my problem may not be language-specific, but since I'm using Django/Python, so I just put it in the title. But a general answer about the pros and cons would be enough. Thanks!
Check out the mailbox module:
http://docs.python.org/2/library/mailbox.html
http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/mailbox.html
It would be far faster to just read the messages directly than to interact via IMAP.
I would like to get a file attached to an email I receive using Outlook.
I need to run this python script in a Linux Box.
I read about the win32com.client library.
Do you know if it works also for Linux?
If not do you know any alternative if there are?
Coincidentally, today I posted an example of retrieving attachments over IMAP here, it may be of some use to you.
Outlook is an email client, it may use one or more of a variety of protocols (MAPI,POP,IMAP) to access your mailbox. Your mail may be stored on the server, or it may be stored on your computer (more likely when using POP).
I have a postfix server listening and receiving all emails received at mywebsite.com Now I want to show these postfix emails in a customized interface and that too for each user
To be clear, all the users of mywebsite.com will be given mail addresses like someguy#mywebsite.com who receives email on my production machine but he sees them in his own console built into his dashboard at mywebsite.com.
So to make the user see the mail he received, I need to create an email replica of the postfix mail so that mywebsite(which runs on django-python) will be reflecting them readily. How do I achieve this. To be precise this is my question, how do I convert a postfix mail to a python mail object(so that my system/website)understands it?
Just to be clear I have written psuedo code to achieve what I want:
email_as_python_object = postfix_email_convertor(postfix_email)
attachments_list = email_as_python_object.attachments
body = email_as_python_object.body # be it html or whatever
And by the way I have tried default email module which comes with python but thats not handy for all the cases. And even I need to deal with mail attachments manually(which I hate). I just need a simple way to deal with cases like these(I was wondering how postfix understands a email received. ie.. how it automatically figures out different headers,attachments etc..). Please help me.
You want to have postfix deliver to a local mailbox, and then use a webmail system for people to access that stored mail.
Don't get hung up on postfix - it just a transfer agent - it takes messages from one place, and puts them somewhere else, it doesn't store messages.
So postfix will take the messages over SMTP, and put them in local mail files.
Then IMAP or some webmail system will display those messages to your users.
If you want the mail integrated in your webapp, then you should probably run an IMAP server, and use python IMAP libraries to get the messages.
First of all, Postfix mail routing rules can be very complex and your presumably preferred solution involves a lot of trickery in the wrong places. You do not want to accidentally show some user anothers mails, do you? Second, although Postfix can do almost anything, it shouldn't as it only is a MDA (mail delivery agent).
Your solution is best solved by using a POP3 or IMAP server (Cyrus IMAPd, Courier, etc). IMAP servers can have "superuser accounts" who can read mails of all users. Your web application can then connect to the users mailbox and retreive the headers and bodys.
If you only want to show the subject-line you can fetch those with a special IMAP command and very low overhead. The Python IMAP library has not the easiest to understand API though. I'll give it a shot (not checked!) with an example taken from the standard library:
import imaplib
sess = imaplib.IMAP4()
sess.login('superuser', 'password')
# Honor the mailbox syntax of your server!
sess.select('INBOX/Luke') # Or something similar.
typ, data = sess.search(None, 'ALL') # All Messages.
subjectlines = []
for num in data[0].split():
typ, msgdata = sess.fetch(num, '(RFC822.SIZE BODY[HEADER.FIELDS (SUBJECT)])')
subject = msgdata[0][1].lstrip('Subject: ').strip()
subjectlines.append(subject)
This logs into the IMAP server, selects the users mailbox, fetches all the message-ids then fetches (hopefully) only the subjectlines and appends the resulting data onto the subjectlines list.
To fetch other parts of the mail vary the line with sess.fetch. For the specific syntax of fetch have a look at RFC 2060 (Section 6.4.5).
Good luck!
I'm not sure that I understand the question.
If you want your remote web application to be able to view users' mailbox, you could install a pop or imap server and use a mail client (you should be able to find one off the shelf) to read the emails. Alternatively, you could write something to interrogate the pop/imap server using the relevant libraries that come with Python itself.
If you want to replicate the mail to another machine, you could use procmail and set up actions to do this. Postfix can be set up to invoke procmail in this wayy.