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I am using poplib to grab emails from a mail server. The method retr(n) retrieves the nth email message. It returns messages in a funny form where everything is broken into lines and placed in a tuple. What gives! : it inserts the characters '3D' randomly into the email. Furthermore, it breaks tagged elements into pieces and inserts '=' at the break. As anyone else seen this?

user442920
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  • That's called "Quoted Printable" encoding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable) the messages are (in all likelihood) already formatted that way. – nobody Apr 01 '14 at 21:18
  • neat thanks! You might want to make that into an answer so I can mark it. – user442920 Apr 02 '14 at 01:10

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Giving Andrew Medico credit, the string you are seeing is in "Quoted Printable Encoding" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable). The emails were already in that format when I received them, in my case.

I was able to turn it back into a "normal" string using the quopri module (https://docs.python.org/2/library/quopri.html). 

import poplib
import quopri

pop_conn = poplib.POP3_SSL( "the_host" )
pop_conn.user("my_user")
pop_conn.pass_("my_password")

email_i_want = 1

encoded_msg = pop_conn.retr( email_i_want )[1]
joined_msg = str( '\n'.join(encoded_msg) )
decoded_msg = quopri.decodestring( joined_msg )

print decoded_msg
Nate-Bit Int
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