Need help getting emails with files from Gmail
I’m trying to figure out how to access my Gmail account and find messages that have files attached. Once I can do that, I want to save each attached file to my computer. It would also be great if I could see who sent the email and what the subject line was for each message as I’m downloading the files.
Does anyone know a good way to do this? I’m not sure where to start or what tools I might need. Any tips or code examples would be super helpful. Thanks!
hey man, i use the gmail api for this. its pretty straightforward. u can authenticate, search for messages w/ attachments, then download em. theres good python libraries that make it easy. just watch out for rate limits and big files. good luck!
I’ve had success using the google-auth and google-auth-oauthlib libraries for authentication, coupled with the googleapiclient for interacting with Gmail’s API. This approach offers robust functionality and good documentation.
First, set up OAuth 2.0 credentials in the Google Cloud Console. Then, use the Gmail API to search for messages with attachments using query parameters like ‘has:attachment’. Iterate through the results to extract metadata and download attachments.
A word of caution: be mindful of attachment size limits and implement proper error handling. Also, consider implementing a backoff strategy to avoid hitting API quotas.
If you’re dealing with a large volume of emails, you might want to look into batch processing to optimize performance. Happy coding!
I’ve actually tackled this exact problem before for a work project. The best approach I found was using Python with the imaplib and email libraries. Here’s a quick rundown of the process:
- Connect to Gmail’s IMAP server
- Search for emails with attachments
- Iterate through matching emails
- Extract sender, subject, and attachment info
- Download attachments to local folder
The trickiest part was handling different attachment types and encodings. Make sure to properly decode base64 attachments. Also, be aware of Gmail’s API usage limits if you’re processing a large number of emails.
One gotcha to watch out for - some attachments may have spaces or special characters in the filename. You’ll want to sanitize those before saving to avoid issues.
Hope that helps point you in the right direction! Let me know if you need any clarification on the steps.