How to access a subfolder in Outlook inbox in Python

Question

I have created a rule in Outlook to move all incoming messages from a particular sender to a subfolder in my Inbox.Like -

Inbox
- Subfolder

I wrote a piece of code

import win32com.client

outlook = win32com.client.Dispatch("Outlook.Application").GetNamespace("MAPI")

inbox = outlook.GetDefaultFolder(6) #6 = Inbox (without mails from the subfolder)
messages = inbox.Items
message = messages.GetLast()
body_content = message.body 
print body_content #Sometimes has parsing error due to different encoding format

How can I

1) Read the mails in this particular folder inside Inbox

2) Take care of error like UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode - character maps to

print (u'\2109') issues this error too.

@Jean-FrançoisFabre - print (u'\2109').encode('cp1252') - same error — Prateek Narendra, Jan 10 '17 at 08:13
@Jean-FrançoisFabre - utf-8 worked. Thanks.. I tried ASCII and had given up :P — Prateek Narendra, Jan 10 '17 at 08:17

Sanket · Answer 1 · 2018-01-10T08:27:04.100

3

outlook.GetDefaultFolder(6) is "Inbox" position by default. You need to traverse the list of folders in it, so try this

inbox = outlook.GetDefaultFolder(6).Folders.Item("Your_Folder_Name")

edited Jan 10 '18 at 08:27

answered Jan 10 '18 at 03:40

Sanket

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Thank you for this code snippet, which might provide some limited, immediate help. A [proper explanation would greatly improve its long-term value](//meta.stackexchange.com/q/114762/350567) by showing *why* this is a good solution to the problem, and would make it more useful to future readers with other, similar questions. Please [edit] your answer to add some explanation, including the assumptions you've made. – iBug Jan 10 '18 at 04:11
Hey there! Do you know if it's possible to access a subfolder of a subfolder? In the list of folders in the mailbox I have a folder and under that I have another folder that I can't access – Julanu Feb 20 '19 at 07:28
@Jewlanu were you able to access sub-sub folder? – misguided Nov 14 '20 at 03:23

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 10 '17 at 08:53

2

u'\2109' looks a lot like UTF-8 encoding.

So print(body_content.encode("utf-8")) will do the trick.

answered Jan 10 '17 at 08:53

Jean-François Fabre

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 30 '22 at 04:32

0

outlook = win32com.client.Dispatch('outlook.application')
mapi = outlook.GetNamespace("MAPI")

inbox = mapi.GetDefaultFolder(6).Folders["SubFolder"]
mails = inbox.Items

The above method will also work.

answered Mar 30 '22 at 04:32

Suraj Kumar Nanda

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How to access a subfolder in Outlook inbox in Python

3 Answers3

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