Accessing Gmail e-mails from the command line

Gmail is a widely-used free e-mail service from Google—http://mail.google.com/. It allows you to read your mail via authenticated RSS feeds. We can parse the RSS feeds with the sender's name, and an e-mail with a subject. It will help us to have a look at the unread e-mails in the inbox, without opening the web browser.

How to do it...

Let's go through the shell script to parse the RSS feeds for Gmail to display the unread mails:

#!/bin/bash
#Desc: Fetch gmail tool

username='PUT_USERNAME_HERE'
password='PUT_PASSWORD_HERE'

SHOW_COUNT=5 # No of recent unread mails to be shown

echo
curl  -u $username:$password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | \
tr -d '\n' | sed 's:</entry>:\n:g' |\
 sed -n 's/.*<title>\(.*\)<\/title.*<author><name>\([^<]*\)<\/name><email>\([^<]*\).*/From: \2 [\3] \nSubject: \1\n/p' | \
head -n $(( $SHOW_COUNT * 3 ))

The output will be as follows:

$ ./fetch_gmail.sh
From...