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New in version 2.2.
The email package is a library for managing email messages,
including MIME and other RFC 2822-based message documents. It
subsumes most of the functionality in several older standard modules
such as rfc822, mimetools,
multifile, and other non-standard packages such as
mimecntl. It is specifically not designed to do any
sending of email messages to SMTP (RFC 2821) servers; that is the
function of the smtplib module. The email
package attempts to be as RFC-compliant as possible, supporting in
addition to RFC 2822, such MIME-related RFCs as
RFC 2045, RFC 2046, RFC 2047, and RFC 2231.
The primary distinguishing feature of the email package is
that it splits the parsing and generating of email messages from the
internal object model representation of email. Applications
using the email package deal primarily with objects; you can
add sub-objects to messages, remove sub-objects from messages,
completely re-arrange the contents, etc. There is a separate parser
and a separate generator which handles the transformation from flat
text to the object model, and then back to flat text again. There
are also handy subclasses for some common MIME object types, and a few
miscellaneous utilities that help with such common tasks as extracting
and parsing message field values, creating RFC-compliant dates, etc.
The following sections describe the functionality of the
email package. The ordering follows a progression that
should be common in applications: an email message is read as flat
text from a file or other source, the text is parsed to produce the
object structure of the email message, this structure is manipulated,
and finally rendered back into flat text.
It is perfectly feasible to create the object structure out of whole
cloth -- i.e. completely from scratch. From there, a similar
progression can be taken as above.
Also included are detailed specifications of all the classes and
modules that the email package provides, the exception
classes you might encounter while using the email package,
some auxiliary utilities, and a few examples. For users of the older
mimelib package, or previous versions of the email
package, a section on differences and porting is provided.
See Also:
- Module smtplib:
- SMTP protocol client.
Release 2.4.5, documentation updated on 18 October 2006.
See About this document... for information on suggesting changes.
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