Accessing GMail through Python | Hacker News Reader

Accessing GMail through Python

users.physik.fu-berlin.de

30 pointsTriinT11 comments

This reminds me of a problem I've been wanting to solve for a long time.

A lot of web apps use email to deliver notifications and other data like reports. I want to take these emails and process them whenever a new email arrives. A few qualifications: The email server and the processing server are separate. Need to access any attached files as well as the message body and other headers. *Ideally, I don't want to deal with any email related libraries at all i.e. want to use something like a Rest API or even FTP (like in the libgmail library linked to in this post). This would make it usable from any language without needing a special email library.

Example Use Case: Your web analytics software sends you a daily report with an attached CSV file. You want to grab the data from the CSV and put it in a database so you can create a nice dashboard for your site.

Would love to hear from anyone that has had experience with a system like this and could point me in the right direction.

I don't know about this, I mean if an application's only API is email, is that something we really want to encourage?

Google analytics has a API now.

Selectively forward the email to an account connected to Google App Engine: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/receivingm...

Then you can write a handler that basically treats the email as if it had been a web request. (This amazing new feature was just added about a month ago!)

Let me know how it went.

Thanks. This does look amazing. I'll try it out and post my results back here. Interested to hear what kind of things you you or others use it for. It really gets you thinking about new possibilities.

The best answer might be Lamson, by Zed Shaw:

http://lamsonproject.org/

An extensible SMTP server in Python.

You might still have to write some email-specific plugins, but they would probably be reusable. For instance, a CSV-receiver plugin that inserts rows into MySQL.

Thanks for this. Lamson looks very powerful but it's probably overkill for what I'm looking for.

procmail

For a hacker, what is the compelling reason to even use gmail? The web interface? Isn't there a way to run your own email server with a web interface?

Amount of time saved using an existing, established service like Gmail versus running your own and fighting the never-ending fight with spam.

You can take that free time to hack something up ;-)

the gmail spam filter is one of the best i've seen ... they have a far larger corpus of training data than any individual hacker could ever access ;)

I don't want to be responsible for the upkeep (and downtime) of my primary form of non-face-to-face communication.

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