Python w/ Selenium Gmail Email Send Automating To: Field is Giving Me Trouble

Question

The end goal is to send myself an email if my public ip address changes, as I don't have dynamic dns and have to manually enter the ip addresses myself for my web server. I've done all I possibly can to try and get bash utilities to do the job for me, but CenturyLink is unfortunately out to block me no matter how I configure my outbound mail.

So I've turned to graphical python/selenium web page automation, which will sign into my gmail account for me, click the 'compose' button, then enter in the To:, Subject:, and text segments and hit send. Everything is working except for one small part - the To: field. The html/css is different for this than all the others and no matter how I try to select the field using

driver.find_element_by_class_name()

or

driver.find_element_by_id()

I just can't seem to fill out the field. Bash will give me an error like

:lo cannot be reached by keyboard

or textarea#:lo.vO is not a valid selector

When I did an inspect element, the element looked like this:

<textarea rows="1" id=":lo" class="vO" name="to" spellcheck="false" autocomplete="false" autocapitalize="off" autocorrect="off" tabindex="1" dir="ltr" aria-label="To" role="combobox" aria-autocomplete="list" style="width: 462px;"></textarea>

My code so far is this: (note: which does not include getting ip info yet, just gmail login / manipulation)

from selenium import webdriver
import time

driver = webdriver.Firefox();
driver.get('https://www.gmail.com');
username = driver.find_element_by_id('identifierId');
username.send_keys("EMAIL");
driver.find_elements_by_class_name('RveJvd.snByac')[1].click();
time.sleep(2); #password not entered in username field
password = driver.find_element_by_class_name('whsOnd.zHQkBf');
password.send_keys("PASSWORD");
driver.find_elements_by_class_name('RveJvd.snByac')[0].click();

#end login, start composing

time.sleep(5); #wait for sign in
driver.find_element_by_class_name('T-I.J-J5-Ji.T-I-KE.L3').click();
to = driver.find_element_by_class_name('textarea#:lo.vO'); #incorrect
to.send_keys("EMAIL");
subject = driver.find_element_by_id(':l6');
subject.send_keys("IP Address changed");
content = driver.find_element_by_id(':m9');
content.send_keys("Test Test\n");

this sounds like an XY problem. Why is your question about emailing yourself when the issue you are trying to solve is about setting your webserver's IP? — Corey Goldberg
Hi, seems to be an xpath or element inaccessible issue. Can you add the screen print of gmail login? I will try fetching the xpath — Swadhikar
Just noted that the 'To:' text area element's id changes dynamically while composing message in different browser — Swadhikar

Swadhikar Swadhikar · Accepted Answer · 2018-08-09T08:27:07

I think there seems to be a dynamic variation with the element ids in different browser. For me when I tried to compose the mail to fetch the XPATH I noted the XPATH was //*[@id=":oa"] but while the script launched it was //*[@id=":my"].

To accommodate this I have used element querying using XPATH //textarea[1] as the Recipients section is always the first textarea. This proves to work well consistently across different browser sessions.

Code Snippet

>>> d = webdriver.Chrome()
[14424:7728:0809/135301.805:ERROR:install_util.cc(597)] Unable to read registry value HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\MachineLevelUserCloudPolicyEnrollmentToken for writing result=2

DevTools listening on ws://127.0.0.1:12582/devtools/browser/31a5ab42-a4d2-46f3-95c6-a0c9ddc129d7
>>> d.get('https://www.gmail.com')
>>> d.find_element_by_xpath(xpath)
<selenium.webdriver.remote.webelement.WebElement (session="6072286733856e53b69af89ea981001c", element="0.42218760484088036-1")>
>>> d.find_element_by_xpath('//textarea[1]').send_keys('cswadhikar@gmail.com')

Result

Python w/ Selenium Gmail Email Send Automating To: Field is Giving Me Trouble

4 Answers