While working through Chapter 16: Sending Email and Text Messages of ABS I ran into an issue using the imapclient library.
To retrieve emails using IMAP, the first step after downloading the library was given as creating an IMAP object with:
>>> imapObj = imapclient.IMAPClient('imap.gmail.com', ssl=True)\
However, this produced an SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED error.
I quickly found that others have run into this issue, and not only with imapclient. I learned that Python doesn’t include its own SSL certificates; they need to be imported. One way to do this is to run the Install Certificates.command file that is downloaded along with Python.
When I tried running this by double-clicking the file, it didn’t work. So I navigated to the file in the command line by copying the Python folder path and pasting it in the terminal:
jchen@ribka:~/Applications$ cd /Applications/Python\ 3.7\
I used the cat command to see contents of the Install Certificates file and saw it was a Python file. Running it with "/Install Certificates.command" didn’t work because I didn’t have sufficient permissions, so I ran as a super user:
jchen@ribka:~/Applications$ sudo "./Install Certificates.command"
That worked! Once I did that, I was able to create my imapObj and proceed with logging into an IMAP server, searching and fetching emails.
(I read that another way is to get SSL certificates for Python with OSX is to download the certifi package from pip. As I already had certifi loaded, presumably if I had just updated it, that would have worked as well.)