Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with something I’ve been meaning to try for a while – setting up a mailbox monitor. Basically, I wanted a way to get notified whenever a new email hits a specific mailbox. I had a few ideas in mind for how I could use this, so I was pretty eager to get it working.
Getting Started
First things first, I needed to pick a mailbox. I have a bunch of email addresses, but I decided to use one of my less-used ones for testing. This way, I wouldn’t be bombarded with notifications while I was still figuring things out.
Then I looked into the python, I needed a way to connect to the mailbox and check for new messages. and use the `imaplib` and `email` modules. Seemed straightforward enough – these libraries are supposed to handle all the complicated stuff like connecting to the mail server and parsing email data.
The Process Itself
I wrote a basic script that did the following:
- Connect to the mail server: Used `imaplib` to connect to my mail server using IMAP. I had to dig up the server settings for my email provider, but it wasn’t too hard to find.
- Login: Provided my email address and password to authenticate. (Obviously, I made sure to store these credentials securely – not hardcoded directly in the script!)
- Select the mailbox: Told the script which mailbox I wanted to monitor (in this case, the INBOX).
- Search for new messages: Used the `search` command to find any unread emails.
- Fetch the emails: If any unread emails were found, I fetched the relevant data (sender, subject, etc.).
- Do something with the data: For now, I just printed the sender and subject to the console. But the idea is that you could do anything here – send a notification, trigger another script, whatever.
Some Hiccups
Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. I ran into a few bumps along the way:
- Authentication issues: At first, I couldn’t connect to the server. Turns out I had to enable “less secure app access” in my email settings.
- Encoding problems: Some emails had weird characters in the subject line. Took a bit of fiddling with character encodings to get that sorted out.
Final Code
I run it, and… it works! I see the details of any new emails printed to the console. It’s a simple starting point, but it’s a solid foundation for building something more complex.
I am not going to post the code here, as you have to type the username and password, I don’t want to publish it.
Next Steps
This is just the beginning, of course. Here are some things I’m thinking of adding:
- Running it continuously: Right now, the script just runs once. I need to set it up to run periodically (maybe using `*` or a task scheduler).
- Better notifications: Printing to the console is fine for testing, but I want real notifications – maybe email alerts, or even push notifications to my phone.
- Filtering: I might want to only get notified about emails from certain senders or with specific keywords in the subject.
- Error handling: Need to add some proper error handling to make the script more robust.
All in all, it was a fun little project. It’s always satisfying to get something like this working, even if it’s just a basic version. I’ll be sure to keep tinkering with it and see what I can come up with!