Best way to automatically copy out attachments from an email

[Chris Rebert]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 10:59 AM, Matty Sarro <msarro at gmail.com> wrote:
> As of now here is my situation:
> I am working on a system to aggregate IT data and logs. A number of
> important data are gathered by a third party system. The only
> immediate way I have to access the data is to have their system
> automatically email me updates in CSV format every hour. If I set up a
> mail client on the server, this shouldn't be a huge issue.
>
> However, is there a way to automatically open the emails, and copy the
> attachments to a directory based on the filename? Kind of a weird
> project, I know. Just looking for some ideas hence posting this on two
> lists.

Parsing out email attachments:
http://docs.python.org/library/email.parser.html
http://docs.python.org/library/email.message.html#module-email.message

Parsing the extension from a filename:
http://docs.python.org/library/os.path.html#os.path.splitext

Retrieving email from a mail server:
http://docs.python.org/library/poplib.html
http://docs.python.org/library/imaplib.html

You could poll for new messages via a cron job or the `sched` module
(http://docs.python.org/library/sched.html ). Or if the messages are
being delivered locally, you could use inotify bindings or similar to
watch the appropriate directory for incoming mail. Integration with a
mail server itself is also a possibility, but I don't know much about
that.

Cheers,
Chris
--
http://blog.rebertia.com