Email Approval System with Python

I built this solution when testing things for my final year project.
I needed a way to pause a Python/Bash Pipline and wait for approval before continuing.
After a brief amount of research, I stumbled across the simple idea of using email.

How it works:

• There's a hidden file called config.py with string entries for SENDER_EMAIL, SENDER_PASSWORD, and RECEIVER_PASSWORD.
  • For the sender, I created a new email specifically for this use case. The receiver is my college email.
  • The receiver's password is actually a GMail app password, which can only be obtained when 2FA is enabled.
  • This file's contents is imported at the top of the Python files.
• send.py is executed, which sends an email to the recipient
• The recipient must reply to the email with either Approve or approve.
• read.py is executed, and scans the sender's inbox for the reply. When it finds it, it checks it says Approve. Anything else is considered Deny.
• If all goes well, the email's UID as well as the message Approved are printed to the console.
• A hidden file at, db/processed_uids.txt tracks the emails that have already been read, so that an email can't be processed more than once.

Screenshots:

References

This projects code was adapted from the following articles Send Email Code Reference Read Email Code Reference