Gmail supports IMAP, at least if you disable 2fa and click the right options. Just use (say) Mail::IMAPClient or maybe Mail::Box to access the mail account, search by message id, and download the body.

Looks like there may not be an easy way to accomplish what I want: according to this StackOverflow post.

I'll keep hunting.

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot Bishop Pontiff Deacon Curate Priest Vicar";
$nysus = $PM . ' ' . $MCF;
Click here if you love Perl Monks

Ah - if you cannot use the rfc822msgid links (as I do in the inverse direction with Mail::URLFor), then that post is bad news in the sense that you can't get there from here :-/

Thanks, I'll check those out. I tried Net::IMAP::Simple::Gmail so far but that didn't have a way to look up the body of the msg from the long form of the msg id.

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot Bishop Pontiff Deacon Curate Priest Vicar";
$nysus = $PM . ' ' . $MCF;
Click here if you love Perl Monks

Here is a solution, though it's a bit convoluted:

1. Navigate to the gmail message thread of interest in your browser

2. Run the following JS in the developer console (or better, programmatically with Applescript, if using Safari, or some other browser automation program like WWW::Mechanize::Chrome) to get the "legacy" thread id: document.querySelector('[data-legacy-thread-id]').getAttribute('data-legacy-thread-id')

Once you get the thread id, you then need to convert it to a decimal number. my $dec_num_id = sprintf("%d", hex($thread_id));

3. Now that you have obtained the thread id, you can use the Perl Mail::IMAPClient cpan module to obtain the messages in the thread by searching on the thread id:

use Mail::IMAPClient;
my $imap = Mail::IMAPClient->new(
  Server   => 'imap.gmail.com',
  User     => 'me',
  Password => 'blah',
  Ssl      => 1,
  Uid      => 1,
);

my $folders = $imap->select('INBOX');

my $msgs = $imap->search("X-GM-THRID", $dec_num_id);
foreach my $msg (@$msgs) { 
  my $msg_st = $imap->message_string($msg);
  # slice and dice messages with modules listed below
}
[download]

4. Now you can use cpan modules like Email::MIME and Email::MIME::Attachment::Stripper and Email::MIME::Encodings to parse the emails in $msgs and decode them as necessary.