Email message¶

The EmailMessage class represents an email message that is being added to a group. It takes an email message, with its lies about character encodings, and produces a message with a Unicode plain-text body, a Unicode HTML-formatted body (if present) and some headers in Unicode. (Most of the attributes of the EmailMessage are methods decorated with the zope.cachedescriptors.property.Lazy() decorator.)

class gs.group.list.base.EmailMessage(messageString, list_title='', group_id='', site_id='', sender_id_cb=None)¶

An email message with Unicode knowledge

Parameters:	messageString (str) – The email message. listTitle (str) – The name of the group. group_id (str) – The identifier for the group. site_id (str) – The identifier for the site that contains the group. sender_id_cb (function) – The function to call to get the identifier of the message author from an email address.

The standard Python email.message.Message class is great. Really. Use it. About the only thing it lacks is some nouse about GroupServer groups, and it does not provide Unicode versions of the headers by default.

message¶

Return type:	email.message.Message

The parsed version of the messageString.

encoding¶

Return type:	unicode

The encoding of the message, or utf-8 if the encoding is lies.

attachments¶

The files attached to the message, including the HTML and plain-text bodies, but excluding those that lack filenames.

The attachments are represented as dictionaries with the following values.

payload:

The content of the attachment, decoded (based on the Content-Transfer-Encoding) to a sequence of bytes.

fileid:

The GroupServer file identifier.

filename:

The name of the file. RFC 2183#2.3 restricts this to ASCII, but the value is Unicode.

length:

The length of the file in bytes.

charset

The character-set of the file if the major-type of the MIME-type of the attachment is text; None for all other MIME types. If the attachment itself does not specify a character-set then the character-set for the overall message is returned. If the overall message does not specify a character-set then utf-8 is returned.

mimetype:

The MIME type of the file.

maintype:

The main-type of the mimetype.

subtype:

The subtype of the mimetype.

contentid:

The value of the Content-ID header for the attachment, or an empty string if absent.

body¶

Return type:	unicode

The plain-text (text/plain) version of the message body, decoded into a unicode string. If absent (which happens sometimes) the EmailMessage.html_body is converted to plain text and returned.

html_body¶

Return type:	unicode

The HTML version (text/html) of the message body, decoded into a unicode string. If absent an empty string ('') is returned.

subject¶

Return type:	unicode

The Subject of the message, without the group name, and Re:.

It is common for a Subject of an email to contain the name of the group that the message is from, or is posted-to:

Subject: [groupserver development] Email Processing Rewrite

While useful for the recipients of the message, it is just noise for GroupServer.

compressed_subject¶

Return type:	unicode

The EmailMessage.subject without white-space, and transformed to lowercase, which is useful for comparisons (see EmailMessage.topic_id).

sender¶

Return type:	unicode

The email address of the person who wrote the message. This is actually generated from the From header, rather than the Sender header.

name¶

Return type:	unicode

The name of the person who wrote the message, taken from the From header.

topic_id¶

Return type:	unicode

The identifier of the topic that this post will belong to.

A topic_id for two posts will clash if the EmailMessage.compressed_subject, group identifier, and site identifier are all identical.

post_id¶

Return type:	unicode

The identifier for the post, which will (almost certainly) be unique.

A post_id for a post will clash with another post if

• The topic_id is the same, so
  • The compressed_subject is the same, and
  • The group identifier is the same, and
  • The site identifier is the same, and
• The body of the post is the same, and
• The sender is the same author, and
• The post is a response to the same message (the value of the In-Reply-To header is the same), and
• The total length of all the attachments is the same.

HTML to Text¶

The gs.group.list.base.html2txt.HTMLConverter class is a subclass of HTMLParser.HTMLParser (or html.parser.HTMLParser in Python 3) that produces a plain-text version of a HTML documents. It is fairly simple, returning a Unicode version of the HTML, and it is used in the rare case that a plain-text body is absent from an email message.

The convert_to_txt() function is a wrapper for convenience.

>>> from gs.group.list.base.html2txt import HTMLConverter
>>> converter = HTMLConverter()
>>> html = '<p>Je ne ecrit pas fran&ccedil;ais.</p>'
>>> converter.feed(html)
>>> converter.close()
>>> print(converter)
Je ne ecrit pas français.

Reply to¶

The ReplyTo enumeration lists the different settings that a Reply-to header can have, while the replyto() function returns the current setting for a mailing list.

Changelog¶