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

• Copyright (c) 2013 Charlie Guo

See LICENSE for details.