{"id":574,"date":"2016-09-13T02:23:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-13T02:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/intelligentonlinetools.com\/blog\/?p=574"},"modified":"2018-01-08T02:55:00","modified_gmt":"2018-01-08T02:55:00","slug":"retrieving-emails-from-pop3-server-using-python-script","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/intelligentonlinetools.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/13\/retrieving-emails-from-pop3-server-using-python-script\/","title":{"rendered":"Retrieving Emails from POP3 Server Using Python Script"},"content":{"rendered":"

My inbox has a lot of data as many websites are sending notifications and updates. So I tasked myself with creating python script to extract emails from POP3 email server and organize information in better way.
\nI started from the first step – automatically reading emails from mailbox. Based on examples I have found on Internet I created the script that is retrieving emails and removing not needed information like headers.
\nI am using web based email (not gmail). In the script I am using poplib module which encapsulates a connection to a POP3 server. Another module that I am using is email – this is a library for managing email messages. As I have many emails I limited for<\/em> loop to 15 emails.<\/p>\n

There are still a few things that can be done. For example I would like to keep “FROM:” data, also some HTML tags still need to be removed. However this code allows to extract body text from emails and can be used as starting point.<\/p>\n

Feel free to provide any feedback or suggestions.<\/p>\n

Here is the full source code for python script to get body text emails from mailbox.<\/p>\n

\r\n\r\nimport poplib\r\nimport email\r\n\r\n\r\nSERVER = \"server_name\"   \r\nUSER = \"email_address\"\r\nPASSWORD = \"email_password\"\r\n \r\n\r\nserver = poplib.POP3(SERVER)\r\nserver.user(USER)\r\nserver.pass_(PASSWORD)\r\n \r\n \r\nnumMessages = len(server.list()[1])\r\nif (numMessages > 15):\r\n    numMessages=15\r\nfor i in range(numMessages) :\r\n    (server_msg, body, octets) = server.retr(i+1)\r\n    for j in body:\r\n        try:\r\n            msg = email.message_from_string(j.decode(\"utf-8\"))\r\n            strtext=msg.get_payload()\r\n            print (strtext)\r\n        except:\r\n            pass\r\n\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
References<\/strong>
\n1.  Read Email, pop3 <\/a>
\n2.  poplib \u2014 POP3 protocol client <\/a> includes POP3 Example that opens a mailbox and retrieves and prints all messages
\n3. email \u2014 An email and MIME handling package<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My inbox has a lot of data as many websites are sending notifications and updates. So I tasked myself with creating python script to extract emails from POP3 email server and organize information in better way. I started from the first step – automatically reading emails from mailbox. Based on examples I have found on … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nRetrieving Emails from POP3 Server Using Python Script - Machine Learning Applications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/intelligentonlinetools.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/13\/retrieving-emails-from-pop3-server-using-python-script\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Retrieving Emails from POP3 Server Using Python Script - Machine Learning Applications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"My inbox has a lot of data as many websites are sending notifications and updates. 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