Hello,
I'm new to Python but have lots of programming experience in C, C++ and
Perl. Browsing through the docs, the email handling modules caught my eye
because I'd always wanted to write a script to handle my huge, ancient, and
partially corrupted email archives.
Of course I know that this kind of project shouldn't be tackled by a
beginner in a language, but I still thought I'd give it a spin.
So I wrote the stuff at the bottom. It lists senders, subjects and
addressees of all messages in an mbox.
Things that I don't understand:
1. Why can I get the 'subject' and 'from' header field unsig the []
notation, but not 'to'? When I print Message.keys I get a list of all header
fields of the message, including 'to'. What's the difference between
message['to'] and message.get('to')?
2. Why can't I call the get_payload() method on the message? What I get is
this cryptic error: "AttributeError: Message instance has no attribute
'get_payload'". I'm trying to call a method here, not an attribute. It makes
no difference if I put parentheses after get_payload or not. I looked into
the email/Message module and found get_payload defined there.
I don't want to waste your time by requesting that you pick apart my silly
example. But maybe you can give me a pointer in the right direction. This is
python 2.4 on a Debian box.
---------------------------
#!/usr/bin/python
import mailbox
import email # doesn't make a difference
from email import Message # neither does this
mbox = file("mail.old/friends")
for message in mailbox.UnixMailbox(mbox):
subject = message['subject']
frm = message['from']
# to = message['to'] # this throws a "Key Error"
to = message.get('to'); # ...but this works
print frm, "writes about", subject, "to", to
# print message.get_payload() # this doesn't work
--------------------------
robert
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