How to use python to click on an email link to download data?

Question

I am trying to read a specific email from my mailbox. And I want to click on 'Click here' hyperlink to start downloading the excel file on my laptop. I am trying below code:

import smtplib
import time
import imaplib
import email
import traceback 

ORG_EMAIL   = "@gmail.com"
FROM_EMAIL  = "myemail" + ORG_EMAIL
FROM_PWD    = "password"
SMTP_SERVER = "imap.gmail.com"
SMTP_PORT   = 993

def read_email_from_gmail():
    try:
        mail = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(SMTP_SERVER)
        mail.login(FROM_EMAIL,FROM_PWD)
        mail.select('inbox')

        data = mail.search(None, 'ALL')
        mail_ids = data[1]
        id_list = mail_ids[0].split()   
        first_email_id = int(id_list[0])
        latest_email_id = int(id_list[-1])

        for i in range(latest_email_id,first_email_id, -1):
            data = mail.fetch(str(i), '(RFC822)' )
            for response_part in data:
                arr = response_part[0]
                if isinstance(arr, tuple):
                    msg = email.message_from_string(str(arr[1],'unicode_escape'))
                    email_subject = msg['somesubject']
                    email_from = msg['igotemailfrom@something.com']
                    # print('From : ' + email_from + '\n')
                    # print('Subject : ' + email_subject + '\n')
    except Exception as e:
        traceback.print_exc() 
        print(str(e))
read_email_from_gmail()

Can someone please help on how can I just click on the link 'Click here to download data' from email I am fetching?

Answer 1

I highly recommend you get the html of the email and then pass it into BeutifulSoup which will then let you search for elements using selectors. Once you have that you can just get the link you are looking for, then you can send a request to the link to get the excel file.

I'm using the googleapiclient library, but hopefully my code snippet will give you an idea.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

string_returned = get_message_using_id(message_id)['payload']['body']['data']
encoded_bytes = bytes(string_returned, encoding='utf-8')
string_configured = base64.urlsafe_b64decode(encoded_bytes).decode('utf-8')
email_contents = html.unescape(string_configured)

soup = BeautifulSoup(email_contents, 'html.parser')
links = soup.select('a[href]')
# The links array contains all of the links in the email
link = links[0].text
# This will request the url of the link, then you can do anything with it.
response = requests.get(link)