Download emails

Save emails from an IMAP server into local files.

Requirements

PyYAML to load settings from a Yaml file.

The settings_example.py and settings_example.yaml need to be copied and have the _example part removed. These new files should be modified to contain local settings.

Usage

Once that configuration is complete, you can run the main script:

python download_emails.py

Automation

Cron job

crontab -e

* 6 * * * source /path/to/repo/deployment/deploy.sh >> /var/log/cron.log 2>&1

Helpful articles and documentation

• 19.1. email - An email and MIME handling package. Stores the raw content from IMAP in a wrapper class.

• 19.9. quopri - Encode and decode MIME quoted-printable data

• 21.15. imaplib - IMAP4 protocol client. Getting emails from folders within an IMAP server.

• How to fetch an email body using imaplib in python?

• How to understand the equal sign '=' symbol in IMAP email text?. Decode the MIME symbols in the email content (fixes soft line breaks).

• INTERNET MESSAGE ACCESS PROTOCOL - VERSION 4rev1

• INTERNET MESSAGE ACCESS PROTOCOL - VERSION 4

• Move an email in GMail with Python and imaplib

• Python - imaplib IMAP example with Gmail. This article in particular was very helpful as a starting point.