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...