IMAP get sender name and body text?

Question

I am using this code:

import imaplib
mail = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('imap.gmail.com')
mail.login(myusername, mypassword)
mail.list()
# Out: list of "folders" aka labels in gmail.
mail.select("inbox") # connect to inbox.

result, data = mail.search(None, "ALL")

ids = data[0] # data is a list.
id_list = ids.split() # ids is a space separated string
latest_email_id = id_list[-1] # get the latest

result, data = mail.fetch(latest_email_id, "(RFC822)") # fetch the email body (RFC822) for the given ID

raw_email = data[0][1] # here's the body, which is raw text of the whole email
# including headers and alternate payloads

print raw_email

and it works, except, when I print raw_email it returns a bunch of extra information, how can I, parse, per say, the extra information and get just the From and body text?

Answer 1

Python's email package is probably a good place to start.

import email
msg = email.message_from_string(raw_email)

print msg['From']
print msg.get_payload(decode=True)

That should do ask you ask, though when an email has multiple parts (attachments, text and HTML versions of the body, etc.) things are a bit more complicated.

In that case, msg.is_multipart() will return True and msg.get_payload() will return a list instead of a string. There's a lot more information in the email.message documentation.

Alternately, rather than parsing the raw RFC822-formatted message - which could be very large, if the email contains attachments - you could just ask the IMAP server for the information you want. Changing your mail.fetch line to:

mail.fetch(latest_email_id, "(BODY[HEADER.FIELDS (FROM)])")

Would just request (and return) the From line of the email from the server. Likewise setting the second parameter to "(UID BODY[TEXT])" would return the body of the email. RFC2060 has a list of parameters that should be valid here.