Welcome to Gmail Client’s documentation!

A Pythonic interface to Google’s GMail, with all the tools you’ll need. Search, read and send multipart emails, archive, mark as read/unread, delete emails, and manage labels.

Installation

Install using pip

pip install gmail_client

Features

  1. Search emails
  2. Read emails
  3. Emails: label, archive, delete, mark as read/unread/spam, star
  4. Manage labels

Basic usage

To start, import the gmail_client library.

import gmail_client

Authenticating sessions

To easily get up and running:

import gmail_client

g = gmail_client.login(username, password)

Which will automatically log you into a GMail account. This is actually a shortcut for creating a new Gmail object:

from gmail_client import Gmail

g = Gmail()
g.login(username, password)
# play with your gmail...
g.logout()

You can also check if you are logged in at any time:

g = gmail_client.login(username, password)
g.logged_in # should be True, AuthenticationError if login fails

OAuth authentication

If you have already received an OAuth2 access token from Google for a given user, you can easily log the user in. (Because OAuth 1.0 usage was deprecated in April 2012, this library does not currently support its usage).

gmail = gmail_client.authenticate(username, access_token)

Filtering emails

Get all messages in your inbox:

g.inbox().mail()

Get messages that fit some criteria:

g.inbox().mail(after=datetime.date(2013, 6, 18), before=datetime.date(2013, 8, 3))
g.inbox().mail(on=datetime.date(2009, 1, 1)
g.inbox().mail(sender="myfriend@gmail.com") # "from" is reserved, use "fr" or "sender"
g.inbox().mail(to="directlytome@gmail.com")

Combine flags and options:

g.inbox().mail(unread=True, sender="myboss@gmail.com")

Browsing labeled emails is similar to working with your inbox.

g.mailbox('Urgent').mail()

Every message in a conversation/thread will come as a separate message.

g.inbox().mail(unread=True, before=datetime.date(2013, 8, 3) sender="myboss@gmail.com")

Working with emails

Important: calls to `mail()` will return a list of empty email messages (with unique IDs). To work with labels, headers, subjects, and bodies, call `fetch()` on an individual message. You can call mail with `prefetch=True`, which will fetch the bodies automatically.

unread = g.inbox().mail(unread=True)
print unread[0].body # None

unread[0].fetch()
print unread[0].body

Also calling Message.fetch twice is lazy in order to save requests. You can force fetch:

unread.forced_fetch()

Mark news past a certain date as read and archive it:

emails = g.inbox().mail(before=datetime.date(2013, 4, 18), sender="news@nbcnews.com")
for email in emails:
    email.read()
    email.archive()

Delete all emails from a certain person:

emails = g.inbox().mail(sender="junkmail@gmail.com")
for email in emails:
    email.delete()

You can use also label method instead of mailbox:

g.label("Faxes").mail()

Add a label to a message:

email.add_label("Faxes")

Download message attachments:

for attachment in email.attachments:
    print 'Saving attachment: ' + attachment.name
    print 'Size: ' + str(attachment.size) + ' KB'
    attachment.save('attachments/' + attachment.name)

Roadmap

Copyright (c) 2014 Wilberto Morales, see LICENSE for details.

class gmail_client.Gmail[source]
class gmail_client.Mailbox(gmail, name='INBOX')[source]

A Mailbox object.

class gmail_client.Message(mailbox, uid)[source]
class gmail_client.Attachment(name, content_type, content)[source]

Attachments are files sent in the email.

class gmail_client.GmailException[source]

The base exception in the library. Also raised when there was an ambiguous exception that occurred while handling a request.

class gmail_client.ConnectionError[source]

A Connection error occurred.

class gmail_client.AuthenticationError[source]

Gmail Authentication failed.

Indices and tables