Colab Gmail Mount - Python

Google Colaboratory (Colab) is a free Jupyter notebook environment provided by Google where you can use Python to write and run code.

Gmail is a popular email service used by millions of people globally. In this tutorial, we will learn how to mount Gmail on Colab using Python.

Mounting Gmail on Colab

Mounting Gmail on Colab means that we will be able to access our Gmail account from Colab using an API key.

Steps to Mount Gmail on Colab using Python

To mount Gmail on Colab using Python, follow the steps below:

1. Firstly, you need to install the google-auth and google-auth-oauthlib libraries using the pip package manager. To do this, run the following command in a code cell in your Colab notebook:

   !pip install google-auth google-auth-oauthlib google-auth-httplib2
   

2. Next, you need to create a project in the Google Cloud Console and create a client ID and client secret. To do this, follow these steps:

   i. Go to the Google Cloud Console.

   ii. Create a new project by clicking the "Select a Project" dropdown and clicking "New Project".

   iii. Give the project a name and click "Create".

   iv. Go to the "APIs & Services" dashboard and click on the "Credentials" tab.

   v. Click on "Create credentials" and select "OAuth client ID".

   vi. Select "Desktop app" as the application type.

   vii. Enter a name for your client ID and click "Create".

   viii. Download the client secret by clicking the "Download" button.

   ix. Copy the client ID and client secret.

3. In your Colab notebook, run the following code to authenticate:

   from google.colab import auth
   
   auth.authenticate_user()
   

4. After you have authenticated, run the following code to mount Gmail:

   from googleapiclient.discovery import build
   from google_auth_oauthlib.flow import InstalledAppFlow
   
   flow = InstalledAppFlow.from_client_secrets_file('<PATH_TO_CLIENT_SECRET_JSON>', ['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.readonly'])
   
   credentials = flow.run_local_server(port=8080)
   
   service = build('gmail', 'v1', credentials=credentials)
   

   Replace <PATH_TO_CLIENT_SECRET_JSON> with the file path of the client secret JSON file that you downloaded in Step 2.

   This code will open a window for you to authorize Colab to access your Gmail account. Follow the prompts to complete the authentication.

5. After completing the authentication process, you can use the service object to access your Gmail account and perform various actions like fetching emails, deleting emails, etc.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned how to mount Gmail on Colab using Python. By following the steps outlined in this tutorial, you should be able to easily access your Gmail account from Colab and perform actions on your emails using Python.