[Email-SIG] Some parsing/generation issues of email in Python 3

[Hans-Peter Jansen]

[Sorry Stephen, wrong key...]

On Mittwoch, 8. Juni 2016 23:42:31 you wrote:
> Hans-Peter Jansen writes:
>  > Dear audience,
>  > 
>  > when coming back to this list, I couldn't believe my eyes because
>  > of the low volume level, but after rechecking with the archives, I
>  > have to accept, it is that quiet here, a bit too quiet from my
>  > POV. Hmm.
> 
> It's just that very few people (one or two) are working on the module
> and in my experience it has been rock-solid compared to either Python
> 2.7 email or the package distributed with Mailman 2.1.  I doubt very
> many people are using Python 3 email on high-volume mailstreams yet,
> as the high-performance networking (eg, Twisted) and perhaps some
> other libraries were late to be ported.

Good to know, at least, I'm not alone.

>  > I was quite astonished to find out, that this procedure isn't
>  > working that well anymore: the email module appears way more
>  > sensible in the current state.  This is a bit disappointing, as
>  > reading the docs conveys, that some effort was put into reliability
>  > and robustness. Given the much improved unicode handling of Python
>  > 3 itself and the ever improving experience in handling emails, this
>  > is contrary to my expectations, I have to confess.
> 
> It's a complete rewrite from first principles.  It's more robust in
> principle and more maintainable in practice, but faced with 100s of
> millions of emails (aka "tsunami of sewage"), the robustness can't be
> guaranteed.  I'm willing to bet it will converge to "robust in
> practice" much faster than the previous design did.

I will take your word on that.

As Barry and David pointed out, some issues probably vanish by simply using 
compat32 policy right now.

>  > Does somebody care?
> 
> email 5 for Python 3 is a complete rewrite from first principles.
> Yes, somebody cared.

Well, there's some light at the end of the tunnel. Good to know. 

>  > Am I missing something?
> 
> Patience and understanding of how opensource software development
> works, perhaps.

Okay, as already said, I'm sorry for sounding overly harsh.

Usually, when I report such problems nowadays, I add a patch proposal for 
fixing the issue, but these issues were overwhelming me. Needless to mention 
the complexity of the email package itself and my reluctance of studying RFCs.

Cheers,
Pete