How to retrieve the whole message body using Gmail API (python)

Question

I want to extract the whole message body of mail using gmail api. Right now i am using 'snippets' but i need the entire text. I searched and found that it's something to do with payload, but i didn't understand how. Can someone show me an example? Also, I am using the Gmail api via python.

Answer 1

same as noogui said but I found that snippet wont return the whole body

when the snippet exceed 200~ chars you will get it under payload.body.data you can find the whole body using payload.body.data

the catch is that you are getting it base64encoded so you need to decode it :)

the following code will do the trick

import base64  
mail = service.users().messages().get(userId=user_id, id=id, format="full").execute()

def parse_msg(msg):
    if msg.get("payload").get("body").get("data"):
        return base64.urlsafe_b64decode(msg.get("payload").get("body").get("data").encode("ASCII")).decode("utf-8")
    return msg.get("snippet") 

Answer 2

Use Users.messages.get from the docs where there's a Python snippet:

import base64
import email
from apiclient import errors

def GetMessage(service, user_id, msg_id):

  try:
    message = service.users().messages().get(userId=user_id, id=msg_id).execute()
    print 'Message snippet: %s' % message['snippet']
    return message
  except errors.HttpError, error:
    print 'An error occurred: %s' % error

def GetMimeMessage(service, user_id, msg_id):

  try:
    message = service.users().messages().get(userId=user_id, id=msg_id, format='raw').execute()
    print 'Message snippet: %s' % message['snippet']
    msg_str = base64.urlsafe_b64decode(message['raw'].encode('ASCII'))
    mime_msg = email.message_from_string(msg_str)

    return mime_msg
  except errors.HttpError, error:
    print 'An error occurred: %s' % error

What your trying to access is the payload.body or if you want to go further, payload.body.data.

Answer 3

The gmail api docs provides sample code that showcases how to return the full message body as a message object structure. However, the code that they provided doesn't work for Python3. If you want to use to do this in Python3, you need to change their email.message_from_string() to email.message_from_bytes. Not sure exactly which module it was that changed this to make this issue happen, but the code below works just fine for me Python3.7.4

import base64
import email

message = gmail_conn.users().messages().get(userId=u_id, id=m_id, format='raw').execute()
msg_str = base64.urlsafe_b64decode(message['raw'].encode('ASCII'))
mime_msg = email.message_from_bytes(msg_str)

print(mime_msg)