[Email-SIG] email package status in 3.X

[R. David Murray]

On Mon May 10 20:02:46 CEST 2010 Mark Lutz wrote:
> I'm probably going to have to go ahead and finish the book
> with the email package as it is now, and include a lot of 
> caveats about the problems that a new version may fix in the 
> future.  I can also post updated example code if/when possible.
> 
> I realize everybody on this list probably knows this already,
> but email in 3.X not only doesn't support the Unicode/bytes 
> dichotomy, it was also broken by it.  Beyond the pre-parse 
> decode issue, its mail text generation really only works for 
> all-text mails.  Generating text of an email with any sort of
> binary part doesn't work at all now, because the base64 text 
> is still bytes, and the Generator expects str.  I've coded a 
> custom encoder to pass to MIMEImage that works around this
> by decoding to ASCII, but it's not a great story to have to 
> tell the tens of thousands of readers of this book, many of
> whom will be evaluating 3.X in general.

This bug should now be fixed in both the py3k branch and the 3.1
maint branch.  This means the fix will be in 3.1.3, as well as 3.2a1.
Hopefully that will be in time for your book, since 3.2a1 is due June
27th and I'm guessing the 3.1.3 release will be some time not too far
off that time frame as well.  FYI I also fixed a related bug that made
using utf-8 as a charset problematic.  Unfortunately I suspect there
maybe some other charset issues waiting to be discovered.

If you have come across any other bugs that don't already have
issues in the tracker please file bug reports.  Anything that
can be fixed in the current package I will endeavor to fix
before the next release.  Feel free also to indicate bugs which
should be given priority.

--
R. David Murray                                      www.bitdance.com