import os import sys import tempfile import mimetypes import webbrowser # Import the email modules we'll need from email import policy from email.parser import BytesParser # An imaginary module that would make this work and be safe. from imaginary import magic_html_parser # In a real program you'd get the filename from the arguments. with open('outgoing.msg', 'rb') as fp: msg = BytesParser(policy=policy.default).parse(fp) # Now the header items can be accessed as a dictionary, and any non-ASCII will # be converted to unicode: print('To:', msg['to']) print('From:', msg['from']) print('Subject:', msg['subject']) # If we want to print a preview of the message content, we can extract whatever # the least formatted payload is and print the first three lines. Of course, # if the message has no plain text part printing the first three lines of html # is probably useless, but this is just a conceptual example. simplest = msg.get_body(preferencelist=('plain', 'html')) print() print(''.join(simplest.get_content().splitlines(keepends=True)[:3])) ans = input("View full message?") if ans.lower()[0] == 'n': sys.exit() # We can extract the richest alternative in order to display it: richest = msg.get_body() partfiles = {} if richest['content-type'].maintype == 'text': if richest['content-type'].subtype == 'plain': for line in richest.get_content().splitlines(): print(line) sys.exit() elif richest['content-type'].subtype == 'html': body = richest else: print("Don't know how to display {}".format(richest.get_content_type())) sys.exit() elif richest['content-type'].content_type == 'multipart/related': body = richest.get_body(preferencelist=('html')) for part in richest.iter_attachments(): fn = part.get_filename() if fn: extension = os.path.splitext(part.get_filename())[1] else: extension = mimetypes.guess_extension(part.get_content_type()) with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(suffix=extension, delete=False) as f: f.write(part.get_content()) # again strip the <> to go from email form of cid to html form. partfiles[part['content-id'][1:-1]] = f.name else: print("Don't know how to display {}".format(richest.get_content_type())) sys.exit() with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(mode='w', delete=False) as f: # The magic_html_parser has to rewrite the href="cid:...." attributes to # point to the filenames in partfiles. It also has to do a safety-sanitize # of the html. It could be written using html.parser. f.write(magic_html_parser(body.get_content(), partfiles)) webbrowser.open(f.name) os.remove(f.name) for fn in partfiles.values(): os.remove(fn) # Of course, there are lots of email messages that could break this simple # minded program, but it will handle the most common ones.