Small program that extracts chat logs from gmail and saves them in a csv file.

gmail_chat_extractor.py

__author__ = 'colorstain@gmail.com'

import email
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from imapclient import IMAPClient
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup #make sure it's the latest version
import csv

def parse_chats(xml):
    soup = BeautifulSoup(xml, features='xml')
    messages = []
    message_tags = soup.find_all('message')

    if message_tags:
        for msg in message_tags:
            if msg.body:
                message = {}
                message['from'] = msg['from']
                #use default value of 0 when there's no timestamp
                timestamp = msg.get('time-stamp', 0)
                try:
                    time = int(timestamp)
                except ValueError:
                    print 'Error parsing time-stamp'
                message['date'] = datetime.fromtimestamp(time//1000)
                message['body'] = msg.body.text.encode('utf-8').strip().replace('\n',' ')
                messages.append(message)
    else:
        print 'no messages in the xml'

    return messages

def write_to_csv(file_name, chats):
    with open(file_name + '.csv', 'wb') as file:
        fieldnames = ['date', 'from', 'body']
        dw = csv.DictWriter(file, delimiter=',',
            fieldnames=fieldnames)
        dw.writeheader()
        for chat in chats:
            dw.writerow(chat)

#GMAIL information
HOST = 'imap.gmail.com'
USERNAME = 'your-username'
PW = 'your-pw'

#setting up the cutoff date for chats
today = datetime.today()
cutoff = today - timedelta(days = 365)

#initiazing connection
server = IMAPClient(HOST, use_uid = True, ssl= True)
server.login(USERNAME, PW)

#selecting the Chats folder
#make sure to enable it in the labels page of
#the GMail settings
info = server.select_folder('[Gmail]/Chats', readonly=True)
print '%d messages in Chats' % info['EXISTS']

messages = server.search(['SINCE %s' % cutoff.strftime('%d-%b-%Y')])
print '%d messages since %s' % (len(messages), cutoff.strftime('%d-%b-%Y'))

print 'Fetching messages'
response = server.fetch(messages, ['RFC822'])

chats = [] #container for all the chats

print 'Parsing messages'
for msgid, data in response.iteritems():
    msg_string = data['RFC822']
    msg = email.message_from_string(msg_string) #parsing message

    #response is a multipart message so we have to iterate
    #through it to find the xml response which has all
    #our chats
    for part in msg.walk():
        if part.get_content_type() == 'text/xml':
            #body is in utf-8 so we need to decode
            body = part.get_payload(decode=True)
            xml = body.decode('utf-8') #this is the body containing the chats
            parsed_chats = parse_chats(xml)
            chats.extend(parsed_chats)

#savig it to a csv file
filename = '%s %s' % (USERNAME, cutoff.strftime('%d-%b-%Y'))
print 'Writing to %s.csv' % filename
write_to_csv(filename, chats)