Filtering out signature images when fetching emails with Gmail API in Python

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1

Hey folks! I’m trying to use the Gmail API with Python to grab some email data. But I’ve hit a snag. You know those pesky images in email signatures? Yeah, I want to skip those when I’m fetching the emails. I know in Apps Script you can use something like ‘ignore inlineImages’ but I’m not sure how to do this in Python. Here’s a snippet of what I’ve got so far:

def get_email_content(self, msg_id):
    email_data = self.gmail_service.users().messages().get(
        userId='me',
        id=msg_id,
        format='full'
    ).execute()
    return email_data

Any ideas on how to tweak this to ignore those signature images? I’d really appreciate some help! Thanks in advance!

2

I’ve dealt with this exact problem in one of my projects. While there’s no direct way to ignore signature images using the Gmail API in Python, you can filter them out after retrieving the email. What worked for me was to first fetch the email data with the full payload, then parse it to extract only the text content. For HTML portions, I used BeautifulSoup to remove any img tags, effectively eliminating signature images. This approach involves some extra processing, but it reliably handles emails with complex structures.

3

I’ve encountered this issue before when working with the Gmail API. Unfortunately, there’s no direct equivalent to ‘ignore inlineImages’ in the Python SDK. However, you can achieve this by parsing the email content after fetching it.

One approach is to use the ‘parts’ field in the message payload. You can iterate through these parts and skip those with MIME type ‘image/*’. Here’s a rough idea:

 def get_email_content(self, msg_id):
     email_data = self.gmail_service.users().messages().get(
         userId='me',
         id=msg_id,
         format='full'
     ).execute()
     
     payload = email_data['payload']
     text_content = ''
     
     if 'parts' in payload:
         for part in payload['parts']:
             if part['mimeType'] == 'text/plain':
                 text_content += part['body']['data']
     
     return text_content

This way, you’re only grabbing the text content and effectively ignoring any inline images. You might need to base64 decode the content afterwards. Hope this helps!

4

hey alex, i’ve had similar issues. one workaround is to use regex to filter out image tags after fetching the email. something like:

import re

def get_email_content(self, msg_id):
    email_data = self.gmail_service.users().messages().get(userId='me', id=msg_id, format='full').execute()
    content = email_data['snippet']
    return re.sub(r'<img[^>]*>', '', content)

this should strip out most signature images. hope it helps!