Messages

maillib‘s Message class provides a simple wrapper around Python’s email.message.Message that tries to decode values to unicode automatically, but leaves access to the underlying object in case you need to do something more complex.

Creating Message objects

classmethod Message.from_string(string)

Creates and returns a maillib.Message from a string that contains a raw mime message.

classmethod Message.from_file(file)

Creates and returns a maillib.Message from a file-like object that contains a raw mime message.

classmethod Message.from_message(message)

Creates and returns a maillib.Message from an email.message.Message instance.

Message attributes

class maillib.Message

subject

The value of the message’s Subject header.

sender

A (name, email_address) tuple from the message’s From header. For example: ('John Doe', 'john@example.com')

to

A list of (name, email_address) tuples for every recipient in the message’s To header. For example: [('John Doe', 'john@example.com'), ('Jane Doe', 'jane@example.com')]

cc

A list of (name, email_address) tuples for every recipient in the message’s Cc header. For example: [('John Doe', 'john@example.com'), ('Jane Doe', 'jane@example.com')]

date

A datetime.datetime object representing the message’s Date header.

Warning

The value is always UTC, so you might want to convert it to local time.

body

The plain text body of the message if one exists, otherwise None.

In practice, we do a depth-first traversal of the message using message.walk() and return the first payload that has a Content-type of text/plain.

html

The HTML body of the message if one exists, otherwise None.

In practice, we do a depth-first traversal of the message using message.walk() and return the first payload that has a Content-type of text/html.

attachments()

Returns an iterator over (filename, content) tuples for every attachment in the message.

references

A list of everything that looks like a Message-id in the References header, and the first thing that looks like a Message-id in the In-reply-to header. See jwz’s threading article [1] for why you’d want to do this.

headers

A dictionary like interface to decoded message headers.

raw_headers

A dictionary like interface to raw message headers.

[1]	http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html