11.10.1. Message Objects

rewindbody () -- function of module rfc822

Seek to the start of the message body. This only works if the file object is seekable.

getallmatchingheaders (name) -- function of module rfc822

Return a list of lines consisting of all headers matching name, if any. Each physical line, whether it is a continuation line or not, is a separate list item. Return the empty list if no header matches name.

getfirstmatchingheader (name) -- function of module rfc822

Return a list of lines comprising the first header matching name, and its continuation line(s), if any. Return None if there is no header matching name.

getrawheader (name) -- function of module rfc822

Return a single string consisting of the text after the colon in the first header matching name. This includes leading whitespace, the trailing linefeed, and internal linefeeds and whitespace if there any continuation line(s) were present. Return None if there is no header matching name.

getheader (name) -- function of module rfc822

Like getrawheader(name), but strip leading and trailing whitespace (but not internal whitespace).

getaddr (name) -- function of module rfc822

Return a pair (full name, email address) parsed from the string returned by getheader(name). If no header matching name exists, return None, None; otherwise both the full name and the address are (possibly empty )strings.

Example: If m's first From header contains the string* 'jack@cwi.nl (Jack Jansen)', then m.getaddr('From') will yield the pair ('Jack Jansen', 'jack@cwi.nl'). If the header contained 'Jack Jansen <jack@cwi.nl>' instead, it would yield the exact same result.

getaddrlist (name) -- function of module rfc822

This is similar to getaddr(list), but parses a header containing a list of email addresses (e.g. a To header) and returns a list of (full name, email address) pairs (even if there was only one address in the header). If there is no header matching name, return an empty list.

XXX The current version of this function is not really correct. It yields bogus results if a full name contains a comma.

getdate (name) -- function of module rfc822

Retrieve a header using getheader and parse it into a 9-tuple compatible with time.mktime(). If there is no header matching name, or it is unparsable, return None.

Date parsing appears to be a black art, and not all mailers adhere to the standard. While it has been tested and found correct on a large collection of email from many sources, it is still possible that this function may occasionally yield an incorrect result.

Finally, Message instances have two public instance variables:

headers -- data of module rfc822

A list containing the entire set of header lines, in the order in which they were read. Each line contains a trailing newline. The blank line terminating the headers is not contained in the list.

fp -- data of module rfc822

The file object passed at instantiation time.