email module documentation

[David Bear]

I'm confused about how to use the email module in python 2.4.x

I'm using python packaged with suse 9.3. 

>From the module documetation at http://docs.python.org/lib/node597.html I
found the following example (items cut):

import email

...
msg = email.message_from_file(fp)
..

Yet, when I try this I get the message 

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'message_from_file'

so I dir(email) reveals:

['__builtins__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__name__', 'cStringIO', 'email',
'getMessage', 'sys']

This is nothing like the documentation on python.org.

Any idea what I am missing?

-- 
David Bear
-- let me buy your intellectual property, I want to own your thoughts --