Python IMAP: =?utf-8?Q? in subject string

Question

I am displaying new email with IMAP, and everything looks fine, except for one message subject shows as:

=?utf-8?Q?Subject?=

How can I fix it?

*"How can I fix it?"* - Why do you assume that it is broken? — Tomalak, Oct 15 '12 at 21:01
It should show just "Subject" - what's inside the =?utf-8?Q? ... ? — janeh, Oct 15 '12 at 21:02
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Difference_between_Q-encoding_and_quoted-printable — Tomalak, Oct 15 '12 at 21:03

score 33 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 01 '22 at 22:56

33

In MIME terminology, those encoded chunks are called encoded-words. You can decode them like this:

import email.header
text, encoding = email.header.decode_header('=?utf-8?Q?Subject?=')[0]

Check out the docs for email.header for more details.

edited Feb 01 '22 at 22:56

Basj

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answered Oct 15 '12 at 21:22

ataylor

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1

In both Python 2 and Python 3, `email.header.decode_header` (with lower-case `m`) is the generic name. In addition, in your code, `text` is not actually a text, but instead a bytes variable. – phihag Apr 19 '16 at 10:49

score 14 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 07 '21 at 07:59

14

This is a MIME encoded-word. You can parse it with email.header:

import email.header

def decode_mime_words(s):
    return u''.join(
        word.decode(encoding or 'utf8') if isinstance(word, bytes) else word
        for word, encoding in email.header.decode_header(s))

print(decode_mime_words(u'=?utf-8?Q?Subject=c3=a4?=X=?utf-8?Q?=c3=bc?='))

edited Oct 07 '21 at 07:59

Community

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answered Apr 19 '16 at 10:47

phihag

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Could you rewrite that in a more Pythonic fashion? – wbg Feb 12 '19 at 18:25
@wbg What's not Pythonic about this code? What would you change? Looking at it now, it seems rather well-written to me, and a paragon of Python's expressiveness. Maybe the [generator expression](https://docs.python.org/dev/reference/expressions.html#generator-expressions) is tripping up @deterjan? If you're just targeting Python 3, you can skip the `if isinstance(word, bytes) else word` and the `u` before the `'`; this code has been engineered to work on both Python 2 and 3. – phihag Feb 13 '19 at 08:40

snakecharmerb · Answer 3 · 2022-08-18T06:57:57.973

The text is encoded as a MIME encoded-word. This is a mechanism defined in RFC2047 for encoding headers that contain non-ASCII text such that the encoded output contains only ASCII characters.

In Python 3.3+, the parsing classes and functions in email.parser automatically decode "encoded words" in headers if their policy argument is set to policy.default

>>> import email
>>> from email import policy

>>> msg = email.message_from_file(open('message.txt'), policy=policy.default)
>>> msg['from']
'Pepé Le Pew <pepe@example.com>'

The parsing classes and functions are:

Confusingly, up to at least Python 3.10, the default policy for these parsing functions is not policy.default, but policy.compat32, which does not decode "encoded words".

>>> msg = email.message_from_file(open('message.txt'))
>>> msg['from']
'=?utf-8?q?Pep=C3=A9?= Le Pew <pepe@example.com>'

score 6 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 30 '18 at 21:11

6

Try Imbox

Because imaplib is a very excessive low level library and returns results which are hard to work with

Installation

pip install imbox

Usage

from imbox import Imbox

with Imbox('imap.gmail.com',
        username='username',
        password='password',
        ssl=True,
        ssl_context=None,
        starttls=False) as imbox:

    all_inbox_messages = imbox.messages()
    for uid, message in all_inbox_messages:
        message.subject

answered Sep 30 '18 at 21:11

Artem Bernatskyi

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+1 truly this is for humans. Indeed imbox was able to decode otherwise base64-encoded (in imaplib and the like) subject and other fields on-the-fly. However, be aware if some field is missing the KeyError will be thrown. – Anatoly Alekseev Oct 09 '18 at 14:36

score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Dec 28 '20 at 08:46

3

In Python 3, decoding this to an approximated string is as easy as:

from email.header import decode_header, make_header

decoded = str(make_header(decode_header("=?utf-8?Q?Subject?=")))

See the documentation of decode_header and make_header.

answered Dec 28 '20 at 08:46

Tzach

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Vladimir · Answer 6 · 2020-12-16T06:22:58.680

High level IMAP lib may be useful here: imap_tools

from imap_tools import MailBox, AND

# get list of email subjects from INBOX folder
with MailBox('imap.mail.com').login('test@mail.com', 'pwd', 'INBOX') as mailbox:
    subjects = [msg.subject for msg in mailbox.fetch()]

Parsed email message attributes
Query builder for searching emails
Actions with emails: copy, delete, flag, move, seen
Actions with folders: list, set, get, create, exists, rename, delete, status
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Python IMAP: =?utf-8?Q? in subject string

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