Extract email attachments in bulk

By the Mail → Excel team · Updated 2026-10-18

Saving attachments one by one is the slowest part of any inbox cleanup. This is how to pull them all into a folder automatically.

What “bulk extraction” actually means

You connect to the mailbox over IMAP, walk every message, find parts that have a filename, decode the payload and write it to disk. No cloud service needed — files never leave your machine.

import imaplib, email, os, re

imap = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL("imap.example.com")
imap.login("user@example.com", "APP_PASSWORD")
imap.select("INBOX", readonly=True)

status, data = imap.search(None, 'ALL')
os.makedirs("attachments", exist_ok=True)
seen = {}

for num in data[0].split():
    status, msg_data = imap.fetch(num, "(RFC822)")
    msg = email.message_from_bytes(msg_data[0][1])
    for part in msg.walk():
        name = part.get_filename()
        if not name:
            continue
        name = re.sub(r'[\\/:*?"<>|]', "_", name)
        base, ext = os.path.splitext(name)
        seen[name] = seen.get(name, 0) + 1
        if seen[name] > 1:
            name = f"{base}_{seen[name]}{ext}"
        with open(os.path.join("attachments", name), "wb") as f:
            f.write(part.get_payload(decode=True))

Four details that break naive scripts

1. Duplicate names — invoices are often all called invoice.pdf. Add a counter.
2. Illegal characters — filenames may contain /, : or emoji; sanitize.
3. Encoded names — RFC 2047 headers need decoding, otherwise you get garbage names.
4. Inline images — signature logos look like attachments; filter by Content-Disposition: attachment if you only want real files.

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