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pythonimapimaplib

Python IMAPLIB HTML body parsing


so basically i have this script that runs continuously and when a new email arrives in the inbox with specific text in the subject, it grabs information from the email. I have only managed to get it to pull the subject from the email but I cant get it do get the body of the email no matter what I try, I believe the email body is in HTML so i attempted to use BeautifulSoup to parse the body but that doesnt work at all. Please help!!! :( Here is what i have so far:

import email
import imaplib
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import time
import sys

username = 'xxx.xxx@xxx.xx'
password = 'xxxxxx'

mail = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('imap-mail.outlook.com')
(retcode, capabilities) = mail.login(username, password)
mail.list()

n=0
while True:
    mail.select('inbox')
    (retcode, messages) = mail.search(None, 'UNSEEN', '(SUBJECT "xxxxxxx- 
     ")', '(FROM "xx.xx@xxxx.xx")')
    if retcode == 'OK':
        for num in messages[0].split():
            n=n+1
            print('Processing Email ' + str(n))
            typ, data = mail.fetch(num, '(RFC822)')
            for response_part in data:
                if isinstance(response_part, tuple):
                    original = email.message_from_bytes(response_part[1])
                    print("Subject: " + original['Subject'])
                    typ, data = mail.store(num,'+FLAGS','\\Seen')
                    time.sleep(120)

Solution

  • Comment: The "body" returned by imap.fetch are usually bytes, not a string, which throws an exception

    Change to:

    msg = email.message_from_bytes(body)
    

    Question: I cant get it do get the body of the email

    For example:

    import email, imaplib
    
    username = 'xxx.xxx@xxx.xx'
    password = 'xxxxxx'
    imap = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('imap-mail.outlook.com')
    imap.login(username, password)
    imap.select("inbox")
    
    resp, items = imap.search(None, "(UNSEEN)")
    
    for n, num in enumerate(items[0].split(), 1):
        resp, data = imap.fetch(num, '(RFC822)')
    
        body = data[0][1]
        msg = email.message_from_string(body)
        content = msg.get_payload(decode=True)
    
        print("Message content[{}]:{}".format(n, content))