Accessing unread Gmail e-mails from the command line

Gmail is a widely-used free e-mail service from Google: http://mail.google.com/. It allows you to read your mail via a browser or an authenticated RSS feeds. We can parse the RSS feeds to report the sender name and subject. This is a quick way to scan unread e-mails without opening the web browser.

How to do it...

Let's go through a shell script to parse the RSS feeds for Gmail to display the unread mails:

#!/bin/bash 
#Desc: Fetch gmail tool 

username='PUT_USERNAME_HERE' 
password='PUT_PASSWORD_HERE' 

SHOW_COUNT=5 # No of recent unread mails to be shown 

echo 
curl -u $username:$password --silent \
    "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | \
     tr -d '\n' | sed 's:</entry>:\n:g' |\ 
     sed -n 's/.*<title>\(.*\)<\/title.*<author><name>\([^<]*\)<\/name><email>
 \([^<]*\).*/From: \2 [\3] \nSubject: \1\n/p' | \ 
head -n $(( $SHOW_COUNT * 3 ))

The output resembles this:

$ ./fetch_gmail.sh...