#turn on "Less Secure Apps" https://www.google.com/settings/security/lesssecureapps #do a quick check curl -u username:password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" |sed 's/": # print email_body # we use walk to create a generator so we can iterate on the parts and forget about the recursive headach for part in mail.walk(): # multipart are just containers, so we skip them if part.get_content_maintype() == 'multipart': continue # is this part an attachment ? if part.get('Content-Disposition') is None: continue filename = part.get_filename() counter = 1 # if there is no filename, we create one with a counter to avoid duplicates if not filename: filename = 'part-%03d%s' % (counter, 'bin') counter += 1 att_path = os.path.join(detach_dir, filename) #Check if its already there if not os.path.isfile(att_path) : # finally write the stuff fp = open(att_path, 'wb') fp.write(part.get_payload(decode=True)) fp.close()