Programming Python, 3rd Edition

POP: Fetching Email

I admit it: up until just before 2000, I took a lowest-common-denominator approach to email. I preferred to check my messages by Telnetting to my ISP and using a simple command-line email interface. Of course, that’s not ideal for mail with attachments, pictures, and the like, but its portability was staggering—because Telnet runs on almost any machine with a network link, I was able to check my mail quickly and easily from anywhere on the planet. Given that I make my living traveling around the world teaching Python classes, this wild accessibility was a big win.

Like web site maintenance, times have changed on this front, too: when my ISP took away Telnet access, they also took away my email access. Luckily, Python came to the rescue—by writing email access scripts in Python, I could still read and send email from any machine in the world that has Python and an Internet connection. Python can be as portable a solution as Telnet, but much more powerful.

Moreover, I can still use these scripts as an alternative to tools suggested by the ISP, such as Microsoft Outlook. Besides not being fond of delegating control to commercial products of large companies, tools like Outlook generally download mail to your PC and delete it from the mail server as soon as you access it by default. This keeps your email box small (and your ISP happy), but it isn’t exactly friendly to traveling Python salespeople—once accessed, you cannot reaccess a prior email from any machine except ...