Mastering Python Scripting for System Administrators

Receiving email using the poplib library

POP3 stands for Post Office Protocol version 3. This standard protocol helps you receive emails from a remote server to our local machine. The main advantage of POP3 is that it allows us to download emails on to our local machine and read the downloaded emails offline.

The POP3 protocol works on two ports:

• Port 110: The default non-encrypted port
• Port 995: The encrypted port

Now, we'll see some examples. First, we'll see an example where we get a number of emails. For that, create a script, number_of_emails.py, and write the following content in it:

import poplibimport getpasspop3_server = 'pop.gmail.com'username = 'Emaild_address'password = getpass.getpass()email_obj = poplib.POP3_SSL(pop3_server) ...