Extracting message from django queryset

Question

I'm working with a django app called django-mailbox (http://django-mailbox.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html) the purpose of which is to consume emails.

The app creates a "Message" model that looks like:

u'django_mailbox.message': {
        'Meta': {'object_name': 'Message'},
        'body': ('django.db.models.fields.TextField', [], {}),
        'encoded': ('django.db.models.fields.BooleanField', [], {'default': 'False'}),
        'from_header': ('django.db.models.fields.CharField', [], {'max_length': '255'}),
        u'id': ('django.db.models.fields.AutoField', [], {'primary_key': 'True'}),
        'in_reply_to': ('django.db.models.fields.related.ForeignKey', [], {'blank': 'True', 'related_name': "'replies'", 'null': 'True', 'to': u"orm['django_mailbox.Message']"}),
        'mailbox': ('django.db.models.fields.related.ForeignKey', [], {'related_name': "'messages'", 'to': u"orm['django_mailbox.Mailbox']"}),
        'message_id': ('django.db.models.fields.CharField', [], {'max_length': '255'}),
        'outgoing': ('django.db.models.fields.BooleanField', [], {'default': 'False'}),
        'processed': ('django.db.models.fields.DateTimeField', [], {'auto_now_add': 'True', 'blank': 'True'}),
        'read': ('django.db.models.fields.DateTimeField', [], {'default': 'None', 'null': 'True', 'blank': 'True'}),
        'subject': ('django.db.models.fields.CharField', [], {'max_length': '255'}),
        'to_header': ('django.db.models.fields.TextField', [], {})

I am trying to extract the email text from various messages. Using the database API in the I have run the following:

>>> from django_mailbox.models import Message
>>> o = Message.objects.filter(in_reply_to_id__gt=0)
>>> n = o.values('body')
>>> n
[{'body': u'RGVsaXZlcmVkLVRvOiByb2JiaW5zYWxpc0BnbWFpbC5jb20KUmVjZWl2.......

Obviously the body is encoded somehow. How can I decode this and find the actual text in the emails?

Simeon Visser · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-21 18:27:15Z

2

According to the docs:

Email message bodies are base-64 encoded when stored in the database.

So you can obtain the message contents by calling base64.b64decode from the base64 module.

The e-mail text that you've mentioned so far is:

>>> s = "RGVsaXZlcmVkLVRvOiByb2JiaW5zYWxpc0BnbWFpbC5jb20KUmVjZWl2"
>>> import base64
>>> base64.b64decode(s)
'Delivered-To: <some email address>\nReceiv'

I have removed the e-mail address from the decoded output so it's not included in search results.

answered Nov 21, 2013 at 18:27

Simeon Visser

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