I’m trying to figure out how to access my Gmail account programmatically and find all the emails that have files attached to them. Once I identify these messages, I need to save each attachment to my local machine. While doing this, I also want to display some basic info about each email like who sent it and what the subject line says. I’m not sure where to start with connecting to Gmail or how to check if an email has attachments. Has anyone done something similar before? What would be the most efficient approach to handle this kind of bulk email processing?
I’ve done this exact thing for archiving. Gmail API with OAuth2 is your best option, but watch out for a few things. Rate limiting will bite you - Gmail caps requests per minute, so handle that properly. For finding emails with attachments, use messages.list with the query “has:attachment”. Then grab the message IDs and call messages.get to get the full details and attachment metadata. You’ll need separate calls to attachments.get for actually downloading files. Big gotcha: some attachments are huge, so add proper error handling for timeouts and memory issues. The whole thing takes forever with lots of emails, so throw in some progress tracking.
for sure! the Gmail API is the way to go. just use has:attachment to find the emails, and then you can loop through them to download attachments. it’s a lot easier once you have OAuth ready. try using Python’s Gmail API client, it really helps!
Been wrestling with this too. The authentication setup caught me off guard - you’ve got to enable Gmail API in Google Cloud Console first and grab the credentials file. Way more involved than I expected. Also, when you pull messages, attachments don’t come with the initial response. You need to request the full message format to see attachment info, then make separate calls for each one using the attachment ID. For performance, batching requests beats making individual calls for every message. Just watch out for inline images - they show up as attachments but aren’t actual files you’d want to save.