This project contains a simple script to extract email messages from an IMAP server.
The messages are written to a simple four-column CSV file.
This depends on the BeautifulSoup library and lxml
for extracting text from HTML messages.
You will need to have a file credentials.txt
with your IMAP server account name and password on separate lines.
Gmail - and many other IMAP providers -
requires you to create a separate "application password"
to allow this code to run, so probably do that first.
Then put that password in credentials.txt.
Then simply run
python store_emails.py
This generates mails.csv in the current directory.
The generated CSV file contains the following fields for each message:
- Date
- From (Sender)
- Subject
- Message text
This hardcodes the IMAP server for Gmail.com and the "INBOX" folder.
Perhaps this should be configured outside of the code
for easier customization.
This brutally marks all messages as read.
Perhaps make it PEEK so as to not change the message flags.
This will read everything in the INBOX folder.
It could be useful to make it remember which messages it has already seen,
and update a CSV file only with information from messages which have
arrived since the previous poll.
It might be useful to be able to specify which messages to fetch, instead of have it fetch everything every time.
The exception handling is not a good example of how to do this properly.