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

[R. David Murray]

On Thu, 09 Jun 2016 18:37:54 +0200, Hans-Peter Jansen <hpj at urpla.net> wrote:
> Apart from all considerations related to streaming/memory 
> consumption/assembly, IMHO the weakest spot of the email package is header 
> handling: the magic formula
> 
>   str(email.header.make_header(email.header.decode_header(msg['subject'])))
> 
> for getting to the "real" subject string is, cough, improvable.
> 
> Sure, this is complicated by the all the other modules, that are using 
> email.header as well. I can only remotely imagine, how hard this is going to 
> be in order to get this out of the SNAFU state..

That's exactly what the new policies like SMTP do, using all the new
code I wrote.  (That is, I did the hard work a couple years ago.)

With the new policies, getting the "real" value of the header becomes:

    msg['subject']

Now we just have to work out the bugs in the new code :)

Streaming and memory consumption have yet to be addressed.  By the time
that's done, there won't be much of the original code left outside of
the compatibility mode :)

--David