Python Cookbook

Module: Interactive POP3 Mailbox Inspector

Credit: Xavier Defrang

Suppose you have a POP3 mailbox somewhere, perhaps on a slow connection, and need to examine messages, and perhaps mark them for deletion, in an interactive way. Perhaps you’re behind a slow Internet link and don’t want to wait for that funny 10-MB MPEG movie that you already received twice yesterday to be fully downloaded before you can read your mail. Or maybe there’s a peculiar malformed message that is hanging your MUA. This issue is best tackled interactively, but you need a helping script to let you examine some data about each message and determine which messages should be removed.

Instead of telneting to your POP server and trying to remember the POP3 protocol commands (or hoping that the server implements help), you can use the small script shown in Example 10-3 to inspect your mailbox and do some cleaning. Basically, Python’s standard POP3 module, poplib, remembers the protocol commands on your behalf, and this script helps you use them appropriately.

Example 10-3 uses the poplib module to connect to your mailbox. It then prompts you about what to do with each undelivered message. You can view the top of the message, leave it on the server, or mark it for deletion. No particular tricks or hacks are used in this piece of code: it’s a simple example of poplib usage. In addition to being practically useful in emergencies, it can show how poplib works. The poplib.POP3 call returns an object that is ready for ...