How to read HTML email - Python

Question

I would like to read emails from IMAP mailbox and extract "From", "Subject" and "Body" (which is HTML) every time new email comes in, it should make the unread email read and eventually put email in a dictionary. I kind of did the whole thing, except the part of changing unread email to read. That doesn't seem possible with the 'imbox' module I used. I avoid using imaplib as it seems quite low level/complex and it should be done in an easier way I think, of course if there's no other way, imaplib has to be used.

Here's the code:

from imbox import Imbox
import html2text

with Imbox('<IMAP SERVER>',
username='<USER>',
password='<PASS>',
ssl=True,
ssl_context=None,
starttls=False) as imbox:

unread_inbox_messages = imbox.messages(unread=True)
for uid, message in unread_inbox_messages:
    mail_from = message.sent_from[0]['email']
    mail_subject =  message.subject
    h = html2text.HTML2Text()
    h.ignore_links = True
    output = (h.handle(f'''{message.body['plain']}''').replace("\\r\\n", ""))
    output = output.replace("\n", "")
    mail_body = output[2:-2]
    mail_dict = {
        'email': {
            'From': mail_from,
            'Subject': mail_subject,
            'Body': mail_body
        }
    }
print(mail_dict)

It returns a row like this:

{'email': {'From': 'emailaddress@email.com', 'Subject': 'subject', 'Body': 'body message'}} 

but email remains unread in the mailbox, so every time it takes the same unread emails. Can my code be modified so that emails are changed from unread to read, with some additional module maybe?

Answer 1

As per documentation you can mark an email as read using function mark_seen with uid.

I also added example code at below.

from imbox import Imbox
with Imbox('imap.gmail.com', username='username', password='password',
        ssl=True, ssl_context=None, starttls=False) as imbox:

        # fetch all messages from inbox
        all_inbox_messages = imbox.messages()
        
        for uid, message in all_inbox_messages:
        
            # mark the message as read
            imbox.mark_seen(uid)