Parsing Email Headers

MRAB python at mrabarnett.plus.com
Thu Mar 11 15:13:48 EST 2010


T wrote:
> All I'm looking to do is to download messages from a POP account and
> retrieve the sender and subject from their headers.  Right now I'm 95%
> of the way there, except I can't seem to figure out how to *just* get
> the headers.  Problem is, certain email clients also include headers
> in the message body (i.e. if you're replying to a message), and these
> are all picked up as additional senders/subjects.  So, I want to avoid
> processing anything from the message body.
> 
> Here's a sample of what I have:
> 
>                 # For each line in message
>                 for j in M.retr(i+1)[1]:
>                     # Create email message object from returned string
>                     emailMessage = email.message_from_string(j)
>                     # Get fields
>                     fields = emailMessage.keys()
>                     # If email contains "From" field
>                     if emailMessage.has_key("From"):
>                         # Get contents of From field
>                         from_field = emailMessage.__getitem__("From")
> 
> I also tried using the following, but got the same results:
>                  emailMessage =
> email.Parser.HeaderParser().parsestr(j, headersonly=True)
> 
> Any help would be appreciated!

If you're using poplib then use ".top" instead of ".retr".



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