Read Emails From Outlook Using Python Fails If Meeting Invites Are Present

I've been able to work out some code through some learning and experiments from resources on the web. I'm stuck at a point that everytime an there is a meeting invite in my outlook

Solution 1:

This problem reduces to a filtering problem: we have a list of objects of different types, some of which must not be processed.

For the purposes of this answer, let the email objects in the inbox be of type Message, and the meeting invitations be of type MeetingInvitation.

Any of these four approaches can be applied.

1. try/except/continue

   for message in messages:
       row = list()
       try:
           row.append(message.Subject)
           row.append(message.Categories)
           row.append(message.Sender)
           ...                 
           # Stores the data in a list
           data_set.append(row)
       except AttributeError as ex:
           print('Error', ex, 'skipping message', message)
           continue
   

2. Check the type of the object at the top of the loop

    for message in messages:
        if isinstance(message, MeetingInvitation):
            continue
        row = list()
   

3. Use the filter built-in function

    filtered_messages = filter(lambda msg: not isinstance(msg, MeetingInvitation), messages)
    for message in filtered_messages:
        row = list()
        ...
   

4. Use a list comprehension (If there are a lot of messages, a generator comprehension would be more efficient - replace [] with ())

    filtered_messages = [msg for msg in msgs if not isinstance(msg, MeetingInvitation)] 
    for message in filtered_messages:
        row = list()
        ...
   

The isinstance checks could be reversed to exclude anything that isn't a Message

if not isinstance(message, Message):
   continue

or extended to exclude other problematic types

if isinstance(message, (MeetingInvitation, SomethingElse)):
    continue

All of the four approaches are functionally equivalent. The filter and list comprehension approaches are cleaner, in my opinion, because they separate the filtering process from the actual message processing.

Solution 2:

Special thanks to @snakecharmerb for helping through the challenges. The complete working code is below if anyone else might need to work on something similar.

import csv  
import win32com.client
from datetime import datetime

outlook = win32com.client.Dispatch("Outlook.Application").GetNamespace("MAPI")
inbox = outlook.GetDefaultFolder(6)
messages = inbox.Items


# Create empty list to store results
data_set = list()
date_id = (datetime.today()).strftime('%Y%m%d') # Used to create the filename

#Iterating through email items in outlook folder  

for message in messages:
    row = list()
    try:
        row.append(message.Subject)
        row.append(message.Categories)
        row.append(message.Sender)
        row.append(message.Sender.Address)
        row.append(message.To)
        row.append(message.SentOn)
        row.append(message.CC)
        row.append(message.BCC)
                
 
        # Stores the data in a list
        data_set.append(row)
    except AttributeError as ex:
      print('Error', ex, 'skipping message', message)
      continue
                
# Print out the result to a csv with headers
with open(date_id + "_"+ 'outlook_Data.csv', 'w', newline='', encoding='utf-8') as csv_file:
    headers = ['Subject', 'Category', 'From', 'To', 'Sent On', 'CC', 'BCC']
    wr = csv.writer(csv_file, delimiter=',')
    wr.writerow(headers)
    for line in data_set:
        wr.writerow(line)

Solution 3:

Here is the one more solution IF YOU WANT TO SKIP THE OUTLOOK CALADER ITEM , by using item.MessageClass below is the sample code and reference link for more details

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/outlook/Concepts/Forms/item-types-and-message-classes

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

inbox = outlook.GetDefaultFolder(6)
messages = inbox.Items
messages.Sort("[ReceivedTime]", True)

for i, msg in enumerate(messages):
    print(msg.MessageClass) # use this in condition

    if msg.MessageClass=='IPM.Note':
        print('Its a Meeting')

        # Identify outlook exchange user
        if msg.SenderEmailType == "EX":
            print(msg.Sender.GetExchangeUser().PrimarySmtpAddress)
            msg_sender = msg.Sender.GetExchangeUser().PrimarySmtpAddress
        else:
            print(msg.SenderEmailAddress)
            msg_sender = msg.SenderEmailAddress
    elif msg.MessageClass =='IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Request':
        print('Its a Meeting')
    # Check only first 20 items change the number as required
    if i > 20:
        break

Some Outputs from above code
IPM.Note
IPM.Note
IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Request
Its a Meeting
IPM.Note
IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Request
Its a Meeting