How to retrieve the whole message body using Gmail API (python)

same as noogui said but I found that snippet wont return the whole body

when the snippet exceed 200~ chars you will get it under payload.body.data you can find the whole body using payload.body.data

the catch is that you are getting it base64encoded so you need to decode it :)

the following code will do the trick

import base64  
mail = service.users().messages().get(userId=user_id, id=id, format="full").execute()

def parse_msg(msg):
    if msg.get("payload").get("body").get("data"):
        return base64.urlsafe_b64decode(msg.get("payload").get("body").get("data").encode("ASCII")).decode("utf-8")
    return msg.get("snippet") 

Use Users.messages.get from the docs where there's a Python snippet:

import base64
import email
from apiclient import errors

def GetMessage(service, user_id, msg_id):

  try:
    message = service.users().messages().get(userId=user_id, id=msg_id).execute()
    print 'Message snippet: %s' % message['snippet']
    return message
  except errors.HttpError, error:
    print 'An error occurred: %s' % error

def GetMimeMessage(service, user_id, msg_id):

  try:
    message = service.users().messages().get(userId=user_id, id=msg_id, format='raw').execute()
    print 'Message snippet: %s' % message['snippet']
    msg_str = base64.urlsafe_b64decode(message['raw'].encode('ASCII'))
    mime_msg = email.message_from_string(msg_str)

    return mime_msg
  except errors.HttpError, error:
    print 'An error occurred: %s' % error

What your trying to access is the payload.body or if you want to go further, payload.body.data.