Getting/Saving email attachments w/ poplib and email modules

[Mike Meyer]

brettk at gmail.com writes:

> Hello All,
> 
> Here's what I'm trying to do:
> 
> I need to connect to a pop3 server, download all messages, and copy all
> of the attachments into a specific directory.  The actual email message
> is unimportant.  Now, I've found plenty of examples that strip the
> attachments from an email message, but most (if not all) of them take a
> file parameter.  My question is this:
> 
> How can i retrieve an email message via poplib and pass it to
> email.message_from_string()?

A quick look at the poplib documentation shows the retr method, which gets
a message by number, and returns a list: ['response', ['line', ...], octets].

So to get a string, you'd do:

from poplib import POP3
from sys import exit

p = POP3('example.com')
# authentication, etc.
msg_list = p.list()
if not msg_list.startswith('+OK'):
        # Handle error in listings
        exit(1)

for msg in msg_list[1]:
        msg_num, _ = msg.split()
        resp = p.retr(msg_num)
        if resp.startswith('+OK'):
                email.message_from_string('\n'.join(resp[1]))
        else:
                # Deal with error retrieving message.

This is untested code, but the details of dealing with poplib should
be right.

        <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.