Member Avatar for nephish

hey there,
i have written a script that gets my email messages, but i need to
be able to strip off all of the stuff except the body of the message so i can write that to a text file.

is there an easy way to do this ?
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A short, practical update that builds on and : the approach in the thread (reading the full POP message and printing the body) is fine, but the original snippet uses the legacy rfc822/StringIO pattern from Python 2. The rfc822 module is deprecated and was removed in Python 3 — use the modern email package instead. (web.cs.dal.ca)

Recommended workflow (robust for real mailboxes): fetch the raw message bytes from the server with poplib.retr, join the returned lines into a single bytes object, parse those bytes with email (use BytesParser or email.message_from_bytes), then extract the best “body” part (prefer text/plain, fall back to text/html if needed). Inspect the result of list() to see lines like "message-number size" and select the message number you want (convert the first token to an integer before calling retr). This follows the POP3 usage pattern. (docs.python.org)

Example (Python 3 — extracts the text/plain body and handles multipart messages):

import poplib
from email.parser import BytesParser
from email import policy

M = poplib.POP3_SSL('pop.example.com')   # or poplib.POP3(...)
M.user('username')
M.pass_('password')

resp, items, octets = M.list()
msg_num = 1   # pick the message number you want (POP3 is 1-based)
resp, lines, octets = M.retr(msg_num)
raw = b'\r\n'.join(lines)

msg = BytesParser(policy=policy.default).parsebytes(raw)

body_part = msg.get_body(preferencelist=('plain',))
if body_part:
    text = body_part.get_content()
else:
    # fallback: search parts for a usable text/plain payload
    text = ''
    for part in msg.walk():
        if part.get_content_type() == 'text/plain' and part.get_content_disposition() != 'attachment':
            text = part.get_content()
            break

# 'text' now holds the decoded message body ready to write to a file

Use policy=policy.default (or BytesParser(policy=policy.default)) so you get the EmailMessage API (which provides get_body() / get_content()); otherwise you may get an older legacy Message object and miss those helpers. For deeper cases (HTML-only mail, signatures, quoted replies, or messy encodings) either walk parts and decode explicitly or use a dedicated library to strip quoted text. (docs.python.org)

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Member Avatar for vegaseat

You could convert your total e-mail message to a list of lines and then remove the first couple of lines. I assume that's what you want.

Member Avatar for nephish

yeah, the messeges come in with all kinds of tracer stuff on them, spam stuff, this and that server......
gee whiz

Member Avatar for nephish

OK i found this in a tutorial, tested it and it works.
just prints the message body.

import poplib
import string, random
import StringIO, rfc822

SERVER = "pop.spam.egg"

USER  = "mulder"
PASSWORD = "trustno1"

# connect to server
server = poplib.POP3(SERVER)

# login
server.user(USER)
server.pass_(PASSWORD)

# list items on server
resp, items, octets = server.list()

# download a random message
id, size = string.split(random.choice(items))
resp, text, octets = server.retr(id)

text = string.join(text, "\n")
file = StringIO.StringIO(text)

message = rfc822.Message(file)

for k, v in message.items():
    print k, "=", v

print message.fp.read()

i am really not to keen on the random part.
how would i use this line

id, size = string.split(random.choice(items))

to select a specific message from the retrieved list?

Member Avatar for vegaseat 
id, size = string.split(random.choice(items))

Looks like all the line does is to pick the id for the server, should be ok.

You can add a line before that to print items, to see what that looks like and go from there.

Member Avatar for nephish

Yeah, that is what i wound up doing.
thanks much.

Member Avatar for vegaseat

What did you get? Was items a list of (id,size) tuples?

If that's the case then you have to go through all the id's in the list and retrieve the text for each with a loop. Good luck!

Member Avatar for nephish

finally came up with this, bits and pieces from tutorials,

#!/usr/bin/python
import poplib
import string
import StringIO, rfc822

# set up server info
SERVER = "mail.xxx.net"
USER  = "me"
PASSWORD = "py-junkie"

# connect to server
server = poplib.POP3(SERVER)

# login
server.user(USER)
server.pass_(PASSWORD)

# list items on server
resp, items, octets = server.list()

# download first message
id, size = items[0].split()
resp, text, octets = server.retr(id)

text = string.join(text, "\n")
file = StringIO.StringIO(text)

message = rfc822.Message(file)

print message.fp.read()

works though.
thanks..

Member Avatar for nephish

oh, yeah,
items does return the number of total messages and size.
cheers !

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