[Tutor] Getting mail out of the box and into the email module

[Michael Janssen]

Hello Scot,

hey "email" must be great! Thanks for pointing me to this.

You must import email.Message to get email.Message.Message()

email.Message.Message provides the object-model; email.Parser.Parser reads
Strings into email.Message.Message instances. When you take a look at
mailbox.UnixMailbox, you will see, that the "factory" takes a _subfile
which UnixMailbox produce from the original file-object.  The parser
method from email.Parser.Parser is what you want as factory. Or with a
shortcut: email.message_from_file()

I currently make experiences with:
mb = mailbox.UniMailbox(fp, email.message_from_file)

I have adapted msg.unixfrom to get_unixfrom() and those getsomething stuff
to get_something. Now my mailbox-reading script is functional but doesn't
do what it was expected to do (kill attachments and uneccessary
headers)... let's see.

Michael

On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Scot Stevenson wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> Progress strikes again:
>
> I'm rewriting an older program of mine that takes mail out of my mailbox,
> plays around with it and then saves it. Up until now, I've done it with the
> UnixMailbox part of the "mailbox" module, which you can hit with a "next()"
> method to get the individual mails as a rfc822.Message object. That was fun
> and worked, but it was one of my first larger efforts and the program, uh,
> sucks. Hence the rewrite.
>
> Now, Python 2.2 has a new module called "email" which seems to be a lot easier
> to use and also seems set to superseed the rfc822 module. There is one small
> problem, though: I can't get the mailbox module to hand me an email.Message
> object. In theory, you can pass the mailbox object a "factory", but that only
> seems to work with rfc822:
>
> Python 2.2.1 (#1, Sep 10 2002, 17:49:17)
> [GCC 3.2] on linux2
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
> >>> import mailbox
> >>> import email
> >>> thebox = file("test.mbox", "r")
> >>> rawbox = mailbox.UnixMailbox(thebox, email.Message)
> >>> rawbox.next()
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.2/mailbox.py", line 34, in next
>     return self.factory(_Subfile(self.fp, start, stop))
> TypeError: 'module' object is not callable
>
> The difference seems to be that the email.Message constructor doesn't take
> arguments, in constrast to rfc822.Message, which takes anything that has a
> readline() method. Bummer.
>
> Of course, what I could do is take the rfc822.Message object, save it as a
> file (or rather a file-like object in memory), and reload it with some of the
> tricks of the email module -- but then I could just as well use the rfc822
> module directly.
>
> Now, am I missing something here, or has the mailbox module failed to go with
> the times? And just how do you get a message out of a Unix mailbox and into a
> email.Message object?
>
> Thanks,
> Y, Scot
>
> --
>   Scot W. Stevenson -- scot@possum.in-berlin.de -- Zepernick, Germany
>
>
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