After getting the username for the account, you need to setup the login. With a bit of coding, you could do this with the re and socket modules, but why? The poplib module does it for you. Using the user method of the Mailbox class provided by poplib, one can login and treat the mailbox as an object. For an example of how to do that, see "Setting Up the Login", third in the series "Retrieving POP3 Email with poplib".