How to get the body text of email with imaplib? - python-3.x

Question

I am in python3.4 .
import imaplib
import email
user="XXXX"
password="YYYY"
con=imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('imap.gmail.com')
con.login(user,password)
con.list()
con.select("INBOX")
result,data=con.fetch(b'1', '(RFC822)')
raw=email.message_from_bytes(data[0][1])
>>> raw["From"]
'xxxx'
>>> raw["To"]
'python-list#python.org'
>>> raw["Subject"]
'Re:get the min date from a list'
When i run 'print(raw)' there are many lines of the body of the email ,
i can't get it with raw[TEXT] OR raw['TEXT'] OR raw['BODY'] ,
how can i get the body of the email text?

Answer 1

You're asking it for a header named TEXT or BODY, and obviously there is no such thing. I think you're mixing up IMAP4 part names (the things you pass in con.fetch) and RFC2822 header names (the things you use in an email.message.Message).
As the email.message documentation explains, a Message consists of headers and a payload. The payload is either a string (for non-multipart messages) or a list of sub-Messages (for multipart). Either way, what you want here is raw.get_payload().
If you want to handle both, you can either first check raw.is_multipart(), or you can check the type returned from get_payload(). Of course you have to do decide what you want to do in the case of a multipart message; what counts as "the body" when there are three parts? Do you want the first? The first text/plain? The first text/*? The first text/plain if there is one, the first text/* if not, and the first of anything if even that doesn't exist? Or all of them concatenated together?
Let's assume you just want the first one. To do that:
def get_text(msg):
if msg.is_multipart():
return get_text(msg.get_payload(0))
else:
return msg.get_payload(None, True)
If you want something different, hopefully you can figure out how to do it yourself. (See the get_content_type and/or get_content_maintype methods on Message.)

Answer 2

Following up using Python 3.8 - parses all the parts that have an associated encoding and turns it into a single HTML page
import imaplib
import email
import webbrowser
import tempfile
import webbrowser
def email_to_html(parsed):
all_parts = []
for part in parsed.walk():
if type(part.get_payload()) == list:
for subpart in part.get_payload():
all_parts += email_to_html(subpart)
else:
if encoding := part.get_content_charset():
all_parts.append(part.get_payload(decode=True).decode(encoding))
return ''.join(all_parts)
# Login
imap = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL("imap.gmail.com")
result = imap.login("username", "password")
# Select the inbox, grab only the unseen emails
status, resp = imap.select('INBOX')
status, response = imap.search(None, '(UNSEEN)')
unread_msg_nums = response[0].split()
email_bodies = []
for idx in unread_msg_nums:
_, msg = imap.fetch(str(int(idx)), "(RFC822)")
for response in msg:
if isinstance(response, tuple):
raw_email = response[1]
parsed = email.message_from_bytes(raw_email)
email_bodies.append(email_to_html(parsed))
# If you want to view/check the emails in your browser
def display(html):
with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile('w', delete=False, suffix='.html') as f:
url = 'file://' + f.name
f.write(html)
webbrowser.open(url)
for body in email_bodies:
display(body)