Parsing emails problems

Question

I'm having problems with decoding emails that that I'm fetching.

The script should log on to an email account, get the unread messages and then later on store them in a database. I only want the actual text from the email but none of the html stuff.

I have found many examples but none of the seems to work. I have tried this and this and some more I have found.

The Code I have now:

import imaplib, sys, email
import email.parser

myparser = email.parser.Parser()
conn = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(host='mail.something.com')

retcode, capabilities = conn.login('username', 'XXXXX')

conn.select('Inbox', readonly = 1) # Select inbox as read-only
retcode, messages = conn.search(None, '(UNSEEN)')
if retcode == 'OK':
    for message in messages[0].split(' '):
        if message == '':
            continue
         ret, data = conn.fetch(message,'(RFC822)')
         msg = email.message_from_string(data[0][1])
#        rootMessage = myparser.parse(data[0][1])

#        print 'Message %s\n%s\n' % (message, rootMessage)
        print msg
        print '---------------------------------------------------------------' 

 conn.close()

As you can see there is no decoding in this because everything that I have tried has failed.

I am very new to python so if someone could steer me into the right direction I would really appreciate it. A hack would be all right, it not a mission critical script, but a generic solution would be best.

-G

UPDATE:

There is no error, the problem is that the output is not decoded correctly.

Example input:

 This is a test message.

 Gísli

Output:

 This is a test message.

 G=EDsli

What failed? Please tell exact steps and error messages... – schlamar May 25 '12 at 13:35 — schlamar, May 25 '12 at 13:35

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 25 '12 at 13:42

1

This can help:

import quopri

print quopri.decodestring(msg).decode('utf8')

Or this:

import base64  

body = base64.b64decode(msg)

answered May 25 '12 at 13:42

stalk

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I get an error if I try this: UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode bytes in position 222-227: unsupported Unicode code range . Any ideas? – Gisli May 25 '12 at 13:59
1

Try to remove `.decode('utf8')` or replace `'utf8'` with your email message coding – stalk May 25 '12 at 14:45
Thanks. This is getting me somewhere. I had forgot to change the encoding to iso-8859-1 . – Gisli May 25 '12 at 14:49

Parsing emails problems

1 Answers1