

Accessing GMail through Python - TriinT
http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~mgoerz/blog/2009/11/accessing-gmail-through-python/

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sekizaru
This reminds me of a problem I've been wanting to solve for a long time.

A lot of web apps use email to deliver notifications and other data like
reports. I want to take these emails and process them whenever a new email
arrives. A few qualifications: _The email server and the processing server are
separate._ Need to access any attached files as well as the message body and
other headers. *Ideally, I don't want to deal with any email related libraries
at all i.e. want to use something like a Rest API or even FTP (like in the
libgmail library linked to in this post). This would make it usable from any
language without needing a special email library.

Example Use Case: Your web analytics software sends you a daily report with an
attached CSV file. You want to grab the data from the CSV and put it in a
database so you can create a nice dashboard for your site.

Would love to hear from anyone that has had experience with a system like this
and could point me in the right direction.

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gaborcselle
Selectively forward the email to an account connected to Google App Engine:
[http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/receivingm...](http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/receivingmail.html)

Then you can write a handler that basically treats the email as if it had been
a web request. (This amazing new feature was just added about a month ago!)

Let me know how it went.

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sekizaru
Thanks. This does look amazing. I'll try it out and post my results back here.
Interested to hear what kind of things you you or others use it for. It really
gets you thinking about new possibilities.

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euroclydon
For a hacker, what is the compelling reason to even use gmail? The web
interface? Isn't there a way to run your own email server with a web
interface?

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truebosko
Amount of time saved using an existing, established service like Gmail versus
running your own and fighting the never-ending fight with spam.

You can take that free time to hack something up ;-)

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pgbovine
the gmail spam filter is one of the best i've seen ... they have a far larger
corpus of training data than any individual hacker could ever access ;)

