[Tutor] retreiving email file attachments

[Jeff Shannon]

Jim Haak wrote:

> Does anyone have an example of using poplib to read an Inbox and then
> passing the messages to the email package?   I am trying to parse zipped
> attachments.  [...]
>
> Since the email module wants a file, I've tried writing all the 'lines' to a
> file, but that doesn't seem to work.

I haven't done this myself, but here's some ideas for you to research.

The POP3.retr() method returns a tuple, the second member of which is (iirc) a
list of lines.  You can probably safely discard the other two items.

lines = pop.retr(n)[1]

You need to feed a file to the email module, but saving all of this to a file
would be pointless.  The solution is the StringIO (or better yet, cStringIO),
which will convert a string into a file-like object.

import cStringIO
fakefile = cStringIO.StringIO( '\n'.join(lines) )

I use '\n'.join() to convert the list of lines into a single string with newline
separators, then feed that to StringIO to create a file-like object.  This
object is (for most purposes) no different than the object returned by
open(filename).  You should then be able to give this StringIO object to the
email package.

Hope that this helps...

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International