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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

lutz at rmi.net writes:

 > FWIW, after rewriting Programming Python for 3.1, 3.x still feels
 > a lot like a beta to me, almost 2 years after its release.

Email, of course, is a big wart.  But guess what?  Python 2's email
module doesn't actually work!  Sure, the program runs most of the
time, but every program that depends on email must acquire inches of
armorplate against all the things that can go wrong.  You simply can't
rely on it to DTRT except in a pre-MIME, pre-HTML, ASCII-only world.
Although they're often addressing general problems, these hacks are
*not* integrated back into the email module in most cases, but remain
app-specific voodoo.

If you live in Kansas, sure, you can concentrate on dodging tornados
and completely forget about Unicode and MIME and text/bogus content.
For the rest of the world, though, the problem is not Python 3.  It's
STD 11 (which still points at RFC 822, dated 1982!)  It's really
inappropriate to point at the email module, whose developers are
trying *not* to punt on conformance and robustness, when even the IETF
can only "run in circles, scream and shout"!

Maybe there are other problems with Python 3 that deserve to be
pointed at, but given the general scarcity of resources I think the
email module developers are working on the right things.  Unlike many
other modules, email really needs to be rewritten from the ground
(Python 3) up, because of the centrality of bytes/unicode confusion to
all email problems.  Python 3 completely changes the assumptions
there; a Python 2-style email module really can't work properly.

Then on top of that, today we know a lot more about handling issues
like text/html content and MIME in general than when the Python 2
email module was designed.  New problems have arisen over the period
of Python 3 development, like "domain keys", which email doesn't
handle out of the box AFAIK, but email for Python 3 should IMHO.

Should Python 3 have been held back until email was fixed?  Dunno, but
I personally am very glad it was not; where I have a choice, I always
use Python 3 now, and have yet to run into a problem.  I expect that
to change if I can find the time to get involved in email and Mailman
3 development, of course.<wink>