Scripting Gmail: A short example

25Nov08

I was working on a project once where I needed to download some Google Alert e-mails from a Gmail account and automatically download and organize the data linked from the e-mails. It may or may not sound complicated depending on who you are, but I found a little module called libgmail to be invaluable.

It’s basically an API that, as far as I can tell, interacts with the Gmail Web interface.

You may be asking yourself what benefit this has over, say, accessing your Gmail using IMAP or POP3. I’ll tell you: queries. See, in the Gmail Web interface, you can run queries on your e-mail in the search box, such as from:hilary to get all e-mail correspondence between you and anyone named Hilary. You can do that with domain names as well (from:@gmail.com) to get anyone who has sent you mail from a Gmail address. You can also combine those with things like is:unread, is:starred, label:inbox or label:work. You get the picture — you can have very specific views of your data, and we can tap into this power using Python with libgmail

So let’s go through a basic script. Once you’ve downloaded and installed libgmail (you must install the mechanize module as a prerequisite), open up your Python interpreter and type this:

>>> import libgmail
>>> ga = libgmail.GmailAccount("YOURACCT@gmail.com", "PASSWORD")
>>> ga.login()
>>> threads = ga.getMessagesByQuery("label:work is:unread", allPages=True)
>>> len(threads)

Fair warning, with allPages=True in the getMessagesByQuery function, it could take a while. If you just want to test to see if this works, set allPages=False.This should print out the number of e-mail threads you’ve filtered to a “work” label, just to see how much of a slacker you’re really being. I get a fairly high number, and I’m sure you will too.

Now, to see the subjects of the last 10 threads you’ve not read in your work e-mail, type this at your console:

>>> for thread in threads[0:10]:
...     print "%s (%s)" % (thread.subject, len(thread))

This should print out something like:

<b>tuesday's page schedule</b> (1)
<b>Final Notice -- Free Picture Frame Offer</b> (1)
...

etc.

What the previous code did was loop through a slice of the first 10 e-mails, printing out the subject (unread e-mails are bold in Gmail, hence the <b></b> tag pairs.) and number of e-mails in the thread. A “thread” in Gmail is a collection of related messages.

In any case, this is just a small sliver of what you can do with libgmail. I suggest you download the latest version and documentation to figure out a little more of what it can do. The downloads even include sample scripts to give you a hand.

Filed under: Tutorial   |  1 Comment
Tags: gmail, libgmail, python, Tutorial