Book Image

Automate it! - Recipes to upskill your business

By : Chetan Giridhar
Book Image

Automate it! - Recipes to upskill your business

By: Chetan Giridhar

Overview of this book

<p>This book gives you a great selection of recipes to automate your business processes with Python, and provides a platform for you to understand how Python is useful to make time consuming and repetitive business tasks more efficient. Python is a mature high level language, has object-oriented programming features, powers various apps, has a huge set of modules, and great community support. Python is extremely easy to use, can help you get complex tasks done efficiently and is an apt choice for our needs.</p> <p>With a classic problem-solution based approach and real-world examples, you will delve into things that automate your business processes. You will begin by learning about the Python modules to work with Web, Worksheets, Presentations and PDFs. You’ll leverage Python recipes to automate processes in HR, Finance and making them efficient and reliable. For instance, company payroll — an integral process in HR will be automated with Python recipes.</p> <p>A few chapters of this book will also help you gain knowledge on working with bots and computer vision. You will learn how to build bots for automating business use cases by integrating artificial intelligence. You’ll also understand how Python is helpful in face detection and building a scanner of your own. You will see how to effectively and easily use Python code to manage SMS and voice notifications, opening a world of possibilities using cloud telephony to solve your business needs. Moving forward, you will learn to work with APIs, Webhooks and Emails to automate Marketing and Customer Support processes. Finally, using the various Python libraries, this book will arm you with knowledge to customize data solutions and generate reports to meet your business needs.</p> <p>This book will help you up-skill and make your business processes efficient with the various Python recipes covered in this book.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Automate it!
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Connecting to your inbox


Throughout the chapter, we have been talking about sending e-mails with Python. However, at some point, you might also want to scan through your inbox and read the incoming messages. So, how do you do that? Let's understand and learn it in this recipe.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we use a new Python module that will help us retrieve messages from the inbox. We use the Python module, imaplib, which is available in the default Python installation. Cool, so let's get started.

How to do it...

  1. We start by using the configuration file, which we have already created to store our e-mail and password, to log in to the server. We then add our code to create a handle or an object to work with our inbox. This is how the code looks:

             import config, imaplib
             M = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL("imap.gmail.com", 993)
             M.login(config.fromaddr, config.password)
             print "Inbox:", M
             M.logout()

    If you run the preceding piece of code, you will...