GMail for Python

A Pythonic interface to Google's GMail, with all the tools you'll need. Search, read and send multipart emails, archive, mark as read/unread, delete emails, and manage labels.

This library is still under development, so please forgive some of the rough edges

Heavily inspired by Kriss "nu7hatch" Kowalik's GMail for Ruby library

Author

Charlie Guo

Installation

For now, installation is manual (pip support not yet implemented) and the only requirement is to use Python 2 (2.7+ to be precise):

git clone git://github.com/charlierguo/gmail.git

Features

Search emails
Read emails
Emails: label, archive, delete, mark as read/unread/spam, star
Manage labels

Basic usage

To start, import the gmail library.

import gmail

Authenticating gmail sessions

To easily get up and running:

import gmail 

g = gmail.login(username, password)

Which will automatically log you into a GMail account. This is actually a shortcut for creating a new Gmail object:

from gmail import Gmail

g = Gmail()
g.login(username, password)
# play with your gmail...
g.logout()

You can also check if you are logged in at any time:

g = gmail.login(username, password)
g.logged_in # Should be True, AuthenticationError if login fails

OAuth authentication

If you have already received an OAuth2 access token from Google for a given user, you can easily log the user in. (Because OAuth 1.0 usage was deprecated in April 2012, this library does not currently support its usage)

gmail = gmail.authenticate(username, access_token)

Filtering emails

Get all messages in your inbox:

g.inbox().mail()

Get messages that fit some criteria:

g.inbox().mail(after=datetime.date(2013, 6, 18), before=datetime.date(2013, 8, 3))
g.inbox().mail(on=datetime.date(2009, 1, 1)
g.inbox().mail(sender="myfriend@gmail.com") # "from" is reserved, use "fr" or "sender"
g.inbox().mail(to="directlytome@gmail.com")

Combine flags and options:

g.inbox().mail(unread=True, sender="myboss@gmail.com")

Browsing labeled emails is similar to working with your inbox.

g.mailbox('Urgent').mail()

Every message in a conversation/thread will come as a separate message.

g.inbox().mail(unread=True, before=datetime.date(2013, 8, 3) sender="myboss@gmail.com")

Working with emails

Important: calls to mail() will return a list of empty email messages (with unique IDs). To work with labels, headers, subjects, and bodies, call fetch() on an individual message. You can call mail with prefetch=True, which will fetch the bodies automatically.

unread = g.inbox().mail(unread=True)
print unread[0].body
# None

unread[0].fetch()
print unread[0].body
# Dear ...,

Mark news past a certain date as read and archive it:

emails = g.inbox().mail(before=datetime.date(2013, 4, 18), sender="news@nbcnews.com")
for email in emails:
    email.read() # can also unread(), delete(), spam(), or star()
    email.archive()

Delete all emails from a certain person:

emails = g.inbox().mail(sender="junkmail@gmail.com")
for email in emails:
    email.delete()

You can use also label method instead of mailbox:

g.label("Faxes").mail()

Add a label to a message:

email.add_label("Faxes")

Download message attachments:

for attachment in email.attachments:
    print 'Saving attachment: ' + attachment.name
    print 'Size: ' + str(attachment.size) + ' KB'
    attachment.save('attachments/' + attachment.name)

There is also few shortcuts to mark messages quickly:

email.read()
email.unread()
email.spam()
email.star()
email.unstar()

Roadmap

Write tests
Better label support
Moving between labels/mailboxes
Intuitive thread fetching & manipulation
Sending mail via Google's SMTP servers (for now, check out https://github.com/paulchakravarti/gmail-sender)

Copyright

See LICENSE for details.

olasitarska / gmail