How to fetch an email body using imaplib in python?

The IMAPClient package is a fair bit easier to work with. From the description:

Easy-to-use, Pythonic and complete IMAP client library.

Try my package: https://pypi.org/project/imap-tools/

example:

from imap_tools import MailBox

# get list of email bodies from INBOX folder
with MailBox('imap.mail.com').login('[email protected]', 'password', 'INBOX') as mailbox:
    bodies = [msg.text or msg.html for msg in mailbox.fetch()]

Features:

• Parsed email message attributes
• Query builder for searching emails
• Work with emails in folders (copy, delete, flag, move, append)
• Work with mailbox folders (list, set, get, create, exists, rename, delete, status)
• No dependencies

No... imaplib is a pretty good library, it's imap that's so unintelligible.

You may wish to check that t == 'OK', but data[0][1] works as expected for as much as I've used it.

Here's a quick example I use to extract signed certificates I've received by email, not bomb-proof, but suits my purposes:

import getpass, os, imaplib, email
from OpenSSL.crypto import load_certificate, FILETYPE_PEM

def getMsgs(servername="myimapserverfqdn"):
  usernm = getpass.getuser()
  passwd = getpass.getpass()
  subject = 'Your SSL Certificate'
  conn = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(servername)
  conn.login(usernm,passwd)
  conn.select('Inbox')
  typ, data = conn.search(None,'(UNSEEN SUBJECT "%s")' % subject)
  for num in data[0].split():
    typ, data = conn.fetch(num,'(RFC822)')
    msg = email.message_from_string(data[0][1])
    typ, data = conn.store(num,'-FLAGS','\\Seen')
    yield msg

def getAttachment(msg,check):
  for part in msg.walk():
    if part.get_content_type() == 'application/octet-stream':
      if check(part.get_filename()):
        return part.get_payload(decode=1)

if __name__ == '__main__':
  for msg in getMsgs():
    payload = getAttachment(msg,lambda x: x.endswith('.pem'))
    if not payload:
      continue
    try:
      cert = load_certificate(FILETYPE_PEM,payload)
    except:
      cert = None
    if cert:
      cn = cert.get_subject().commonName
      filename = "%s.pem" % cn
      if not os.path.exists(filename):
        open(filename,'w').write(payload)
        print "Writing to %s" % filename
      else:
        print "%s already exists" % filename

This was my solution to extract the useful bits of information. It's been reliable so far:

import datetime
import email
import imaplib
import mailbox


EMAIL_ACCOUNT = "[email protected]"
PASSWORD = "your password"

mail = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('imap.gmail.com')
mail.login(EMAIL_ACCOUNT, PASSWORD)
mail.list()
mail.select('inbox')
result, data = mail.uid('search', None, "UNSEEN") # (ALL/UNSEEN)
i = len(data[0].split())

for x in range(i):
    latest_email_uid = data[0].split()[x]
    result, email_data = mail.uid('fetch', latest_email_uid, '(RFC822)')
    # result, email_data = conn.store(num,'-FLAGS','\\Seen') 
    # this might work to set flag to seen, if it doesn't already
    raw_email = email_data[0][1]
    raw_email_string = raw_email.decode('utf-8')
    email_message = email.message_from_string(raw_email_string)

    # Header Details
    date_tuple = email.utils.parsedate_tz(email_message['Date'])
    if date_tuple:
        local_date = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(email.utils.mktime_tz(date_tuple))
        local_message_date = "%s" %(str(local_date.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S")))
    email_from = str(email.header.make_header(email.header.decode_header(email_message['From'])))
    email_to = str(email.header.make_header(email.header.decode_header(email_message['To'])))
    subject = str(email.header.make_header(email.header.decode_header(email_message['Subject'])))

    # Body details
    for part in email_message.walk():
        if part.get_content_type() == "text/plain":
            body = part.get_payload(decode=True)
            file_name = "email_" + str(x) + ".txt"
            output_file = open(file_name, 'w')
            output_file.write("From: %s\nTo: %s\nDate: %s\nSubject: %s\n\nBody: \n\n%s" %(email_from, email_to,local_message_date, subject, body.decode('utf-8')))
            output_file.close()
        else:
            continue