python email.message_from_string() parse problems

Question

My setup uses fetchmail to pull emails from Gmail, which are processed by procmail and passed to a Python script.

When I use email.message_from_string(), the resulting object is not parsed as an email object. get_payload() returns the header/body/payload text of the email as a single text blob.

This is the text it returns:

From [email protected]  Sat Aug 17 19:20:44 2013
>From example  Sat Aug 17 19:20:44 2013
MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: from ie-in-f109.1e100.net [74.125.142.109]
  by VirtualBox with IMAP (fetchmail-6.3.21)
  for <example@localhost> (single-drop); Sat, 17 Aug 2013 19:20:44 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.70.131.110 with HTTP; Sat, 17 Aug 2013 19:20:42 -0700 (PDT)
Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2013 19:20:42 -0700
Delivered-To: [email protected]
Message-ID: <CAAsp4m0GBeVg80-ryFgNvNNAj_QPguzbX3DqvMSx-xSGZM18Pw@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: test 19:20
From: example <[email protected]>
To: example <[email protected]>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001a1133435474449004e42f7861

--001a1133435474449004e42f7861
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

19:20

--001a1133435474449004e42f7861
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

<div dir="ltr">19:20</div>

--001a1133435474449004e42f7861--

My code:

full_msg = sys.stdin.read()
msg = email.message_from_string(full_msg)
msg['to']          # returns None
msg.get_payload()  # returns the text above

What am I missing in getting Python to properly interpret the email?

I see from these questions that I may not be getting the proper email headers somewhere along the line, but I cannot confirm. That > on line 2 is not a typo: it's in the text.

BartoszKP · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-18 10:15:32Z

1

Regardless of ">" being "in the text" as you say, whatever that means - it's wrong. After removing this character:

>python test.py <input.txt
example <[email protected]>
[<email.message.Message instance at 0x02810288>, <email.message.Message instance at 0x02810058>]

So the error is not in parsing the message, but in the ">" character somehow corrupting your email text.

answered Aug 18, 2013 at 10:15

BartoszKP

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1 Comment

schroeder Over a year ago

Don't know what's adding that "<", but once I delete it in the script, the parser works fine. The entire system now works as it should. Thanks for the idea.

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