PyMailCGI

A POP/SMTP Web Email Interface

Version 3.0 June 2010 (2.0 January 2006)


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Overview

[Book Cover] This site implements a simple web-browser interface to POP/SMTP email accounts. Anyone can send email with this interface, but for security reasons, you cannot view email unless you install the scripts with your own email account information, in your own server account directory. PyMailCgi is implemented as a number of Python-coded CGI scripts that run on a server machine (not your local computer), and generate HTML to interact with the client/browser. See the book Programming Python, 4th Edition for more details.


Notes

Caveats: PyMailCgi 1.0 was initially written during a 2-hour layover at Chicago's O'Hare airport. This release is not nearly as fast or complete as PyMailGUI (e.g., each click requires an Internet transaction, there is no save operation or multithreading, and there is no caching of email headers or already-viewed messages). On the other hand, PyMailCgi runs on any web browser, whether you have Python (and Tk) installed on your machine or not.

Also note that if you use these scripts to read your own email, PyMailCgi does not guarantee security for your account password. See the notes in the View action page as well as the book for more information on security policies.

New in Version 2: PyMailCGI now supports viewing and sending Email attachments for a single user, and avoids some of the prior version's exhaustive mail downloads. It only fetches message headers for the list page, and only downloads the full text of the single message selected for viewing.

New in Version 3: PyMailCGI now runs on Python 3.X (only), and employs many of the new features of the mailtools package: decoding and encoding of Internationalized headers, decoding of main mail text, and so on. Due to a regression in Python 3.1's cgi and email support, version 3.0 does not support sending of binary or incompatibly-encoded text attachments, though attachments on fetched mails can always be viewed (see Chapter 15 and 16).

Also see:

  • The PyMailGUI program in the Internet directory, which implements a more complete client-side Python+Tk email GUI
  • The pymail.py program in the Email directory, which provides a simple console command-line email interface
  • The Python imaplib module which supports the IMAP email protocol instead of POP


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