Why we can't read the message text from GMail

[Brian Rosenthal]

After a bit of digging and failure trying to read the message body of a GMail message, I thought I'd report what I've found in case someone can add something.

• GMail messages are kept in the "messages" table of an SQLite database named in the form of mailsto...@domain.com.db, in /data/data/com.google.android.gm/databases (requires root to access).
  
• This table has three message body related fields: 
  
• "snippet", which is a short, plain text excerpt of the message body
• "body", which contains the HTML text of the body if it's short (only a few words?)
• "bodycompressed", which contains a compressed version of the body if the body isn't very short.
• Either "body" or "bodycompressed" is used, not both.  
• Almost every message will be longer than will fit in "body".
• "bodycompressed" can be extracted from the database into a file and converted to binary file, but I can find no archive utility that can expand it.
  

This is a far as I can go without knowing how to extract the body text.

Any ideas?

I guess we're either stuck with "snippet" or K-9.

-Brian

[nanobrain]

The only thing I found is this python script: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/578106-android-gmail-export-messages-from-sqlite-database/

[Brian Rosenthal]

I saw that also, but didn't see that anyone actually tried it.  Anyone familiar with Python?

[m3741]

That python looks legit to me. It's pretty simple but I haven't tried it and I have no idea what the compressed version of the body looks like so I can't guarantee that it'll decompress it properly.

On Thursday, March 13, 2014 12:50:52 PM UTC-4, Brian Rosenthal wrote:

[Steve Harvey]

Not sure what you goal is, but script.google.com allows you to write a script from which you can trigger an auto remote url. You can set event based triggers to scripts in google docs or time based for docs or gmail. I have a script that runs every minute and processes new mail for this purpose. Super easy and their tutorials are great. Google scripts+auto remote+tasker is an awesome combo. Hopefully this helps.

Steve

[Brian Rosenthal]

I've installed SL4A, but I haven't had time to try it and see.

[Brian Rosenthal]

I'd like to have select emails read to me through my speaker phone in my car.  I have set this up with text messages and find it very handy.