Updated for recent versions of the Raspberry Pi, Mikey Sklar’s e-mail notifier:
Raspberry Pi’s popularity makes things so easy that it is almost scary. I set forth on a simple starter project of having the Raspberry Pi show me when new GMail messages arrive.
After some searching, it seems that lots of people are already talking about how to do this and there are some great examples. Michael over at MitchTech had the most ready to go code which I pilfered from. Adafruit’s Cobbler Breakout Kit makes the bread board experience even easier with the clearly labeled pins for each of the raspi’s GPIO pins.
These are the things I had to setup in order to get a working Raspberry Pi + GMail + Adafruit Cobbler. You can probably get yourself up and running with this same setup in less than 30 minutes!
For this revision of the guide, I swapped the Python feedparser module for IMAPClient, which is definitely worth a look if you’re handling IMAP mail in Python. (I was using imaplib at first, and works well enough, but it requires you to parse a lot of strings by hand to get much of anything done.) This version of the code should work with most mail providers, so you can give the project a try even if you don’t have a GMail account. Enjoy!