Downloading your e-mail on a server to process

You know all the great features of craigslist and Facebook, that use anonymous, standalone e-mail for forwarding request to an ad owner or replying to a message via e-mail.

Well, I will show you how to do something like these.

Scenario: An chronological script will download new e-mails, then a Python script will process on these e-mails.

For downloading e-mails, I used getmail4. The best tutorial for it can be found here.

For my case, /home/manchurian/.getmail/getmailrc looks like this:

[retriever]
type = SimplePOP3Retriever
server = [my_mail_server]
username = [my_mail]
password = [my_mail_password]

[destination]
type = Mboxrd
path = /home/manchurian/inbox

Make the mail downloading automatic using crontab -e:

* * * * * getmail -n

-n is for retrieving new mails only.

Now it is time to process the downloaded mails anyway you want:

import mailbox
mails = mailbox.mbox("/home/manchurian/inbox")

mails.lock()

try:
   for m in mailbox:
      if m['from'] == 'abc@abc.org':
         print m['subject']
finally:
   mails.unlock()

Cheers,