Download a csv file from gmail using python

Question

I tried different python scripts for download a CSV attachment from Gmail. But I could not able to get it.Is this possible. If it is possible which python script should I us

Answer 1

TL;DR

• I've put together a Github repo that makes getting CSV data from Gmail as simple as:

  from gmail import *
  service = get_gmail_service()
  
  # get all attachments from e-mails containing 'test'
  search_query = "test"
  service = get_gmail_service()
  csv_dfs = query_for_csv_attachments(service, search_query)
  print(csv_dfs)
  

• Follow the instructions in the README and feel free to contribute!

THE LONG ANSWER (directly using google-api-python-client and oauth2client)

• Follow this link and click the button: "ENABLE THE GMAIL API". After the setup you will download a file called credentials.json.

• Install the needed Python packages:

  pip install --upgrade google-api-python-client oauth2client
  

• The following code will allow you to connect to your Gmail account via Python:

  from googleapiclient.discovery import build
  from httplib2 import Http
  from oauth2client import file, client, tools
  
  GMAIL_CREDENTIALS_PATH = 'credentials.json' # downloaded
  GMAIL_TOKEN_PATH = 'token.json' # this will be created
  
  store = file.Storage(GMAIL_TOKEN_PATH)
  creds = store.get()
  if not creds or creds.invalid:
      flow = client.flow_from_clientsecrets(GMAIL_CREDENTIALS_PATH, SCOPES)
      creds = tools.run_flow(flow, store)
  service = build('gmail', 'v1', http=creds.authorize(Http()))
  

• With this service you can read your emails and any attachments.

• First you can query your e-mails with a search string to find the e-mail id's that have the attachments:

  search_query = "ABCD"
  result = service.users().messages().list(userId='me', q=search_query).execute()
  msgs = results['messages']
  msg_ids = [msg['id'] for msg in msgs]
  

• For each messageId you can find the associated attachments in the email.

• This part is a little messy so bear with me. First we obtain a list of "attachment parts" (and attachment filenames). These are components of the email that contain attachments:

  messageId = 'XYZ'
  msg = service.users().messages().get(userId='me', id=messageId).execute()
  parts = msg.get('payload').get('parts')
  all_parts = []
  for p in parts:
      if p.get('parts'):
          all_parts.extend(p.get('parts'))
      else:
          all_parts.append(p)
  
  att_parts = [p for p in all_parts if p['mimeType']=='text/csv']
  filenames = [p['filename'] for p in att_parts]
  

• Now we can obtain the attached CSV from each part:

  messageId = 'XYZ'
  data = part['body'].get('data')
  attachmentId = part['body'].get('attachmentId')
  if not data:
      att = service.users().messages().attachments().get(
              userId='me', id=attachmentId, messageId=messageId).execute()
      data = att['data']
  

• Now you have the CSV data but it's in an encoded format, so we change the encoding and convert the result into a Pandas dataframe:

  import base64
  import pandas as pd
  from StringIO import StringIO
  str_csv  = base64.urlsafe_b64decode(data.encode('UTF-8'))
  df = pd.read_csv(StringIO(str_csv))
  

• That's it! you have a Pandas dataframe with the contents of the CSV attachment. You can work with this dataframe or write it to disk with pd.DataFrame.to_csv if you simply want to download it. You can use the list of filenames obtained earlier if you want to preserve the filename.