Flanker - email address and MIME parsing for Python

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Flanker is an open source parsing library written in Python by the Mailgun Team.
Flanker currently consists of an address parsing library (flanker.addresslib) as
well as a MIME parsing library (flanker.mime).

Detailed documentation is provided in the User Manual <https://github.com/mailgun/flanker/blob/master/docs/User%20Manual.md>_ as well as the
API Reference <https://github.com/mailgun/flanker/blob/master/docs/API%20Reference.md>_. A Quickstart Guide is provided below.

Python Versions

Flanker is heavily used by Mailgun <www.mailgun.com>_ in production with
Python 2.7. The current production version is v0.8.5.

Support for Python 3 was added in v0.9.0 by popular demand from the community.
We are not using Flanker with Python 3 in the house. All we know is that tests
pass with Python 3.6, so use at your own risk. Feel free to report Python 3
specific issues if you see any.

Installing

You can install flanker via pip or clone the repo from GitHub.

You’ll need Python headers files before you start working with flanker, so install them first:

… code-block:: bash

ubuntu

sudo apt-get install python-dev

fedora

sudo yum install python-devel

If you are using pip, simply type:

… code-block:: bash

pip install flanker

If you are cloning from GitHub, you can type:

… code-block:: bash

git clone [email protected]:mailgun/flanker.git
cd flanker
pip install -e .

Address Parsing

To parse a single mailbox (display name as well as email address):

… code-block:: py

from flanker.addresslib import address

address.parse(‘Foo [email protected]’)
Foo [email protected]

An invalid address is returned as None:

… code-block:: py

from flanker.addresslib import address

print address.parse(‘@example.com’)
None

To parse a single email address (no display name):

… code-block:: py

from flanker.addresslib import address

address.parse(‘[email protected]’, addr_spec_only=True)
[email protected]

To parse an address list:

… code-block:: py

from flanker.addresslib import address

address.parse_list([‘[email protected], [email protected], @example.com’])
[[email protected], [email protected]]

To parse an address list as well as return a tuple containing the parsed
addresses and the unparsable portions

… code-block:: py

from flanker.addresslib import address

address.parse_list([‘[email protected], [email protected], @example.com’], as_tuple=True)
[[email protected], [email protected]], [‘@example.com’]

To parse an address list in strict mode:

… code-block:: py

from flanker.addresslib import address

address.parse_list([‘[email protected], [email protected], @example.com’], strict=True)
[[email protected], [email protected]]

To validate an email address (parse as well as DNS, MX existence, and ESP grammar checks):

… code-block:: py

from flanker.addresslib import address

address.validate_address(‘[email protected]’)
[email protected]

To validate an address list:

… code-block:: py

from flanker.addresslib import address

address.validate_list([‘[email protected], [email protected], @mailgun.com’], as_tuple=True)
([[email protected], [email protected]], [‘@mailgun.com’])

MIME Parsing

For the following examples, message_string will be set to the following MIME message:

::

MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001a11c1d71697c7f004e6856996
From: Bob [email protected]
To: Alice [email protected]
Subject: hello, world
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 12:43:03 -0700

–001a11c1d71697c7f004e6856996
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Hello, Alice

–001a11c1d71697c7f004e6856996
Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii

Hello, Alice

–001a11c1d71697c7f004e6856996–

To parse a MIME message:

… code-block:: py

from flanker import mime

msg = mime.from_string(message_string)

MIME message headers (unicode multi-value dictionary with headers):

… code-block:: py

from flanker import mime

msg = mime.from_string(message_string)
msg.headers.items()
[(‘Mime-Version’, ‘1.0’),
(‘Content-Type’,
(‘multipart/alternative’, {‘boundary’: u’001a11c1d71697c7f004e6856996’})),
(‘From’, ‘Bob [email protected]’),
(‘To’, ‘Alice [email protected]’),
(‘Subject’, ‘hello, world’),
(‘Date’, ‘Mon, 16 Sep 2013 12:43:03 -0700’)]

Useful content_type member with predicates:

… code-block:: py

from flanker import mime
msg = mime.from_string(message_string)

msg.content_type.is_multipart()
True

msg.content_type.is_singlepart()
False

msg.content_type.is_message_container()
False

Decoded body of a message:

… code-block:: py

from flanker import mime
msg = mime.from_string(message_string)

None because message is multipart

print msg.body
None

for part in msg.parts:
print ‘Content-Type: {} Body: {}’.format(part, part.body)

Content-Type: (text/plain) Body: Hello, Alice
Content-Type: (text/html) Body:

Hello, Alice

None because no enclosed messages exist

print msg.enclosed
None