18.1.4. email: Creating email and MIME objects from scratch

Ordinarily, you get a message object structure by passing a file or some text to a parser, which parses the text and returns the root message object. However you can also build a complete message structure from scratch, or even individual Message objects by hand. In fact, you can also take an existing structure and add new Message objects, move them around, etc. This makes a very convenient interface for slicing-and-dicing MIME messages.

You can create a new object structure by creating Message instances, adding attachments and all the appropriate headers manually. For MIME messages though, the email package provides some convenient subclasses to make things easier.

Here are the classes:

class email.mime.base.MIMEBase(_maintype, _subtype, **_params)

Module: email.mime.base

This is the base class for all the MIME-specific subclasses of Message. Ordinarily you won’t create instances specifically of MIMEBase, although you could. MIMEBase is provided primarily as a convenient base class for more specific MIME-aware subclasses.

_maintype is the Content-Type major type (e.g. text or image), and _subtype is the Content-Type minor type (e.g. plain or gif). _params is a parameter key/value dictionary and is passed directly to Message.add_header().

The MIMEBase class always adds a Content-Type header (based on _maintype, _subtype, and _params), and a MIME-Version header (always set to 1.0).

class email.mime.nonmultipart.MIMENonMultipart

Module: email.mime.nonmultipart

A subclass of MIMEBase, this is an intermediate base class for MIME messages that are not multipart. The primary purpose of this class is to prevent the use of the attach() method, which only makes sense for multipart messages. If attach() is called, a MultipartConversionError exception is raised.

New in version 2.2.2:

New in version 2.2.2.

class email.mime.multipart.MIMEMultipart([_subtype[, boundary[, _subparts[, _params]]]])

Module: email.mime.multipart

A subclass of MIMEBase, this is an intermediate base class for MIME messages that are multipart. Optional _subtype defaults to mixed, but can be used to specify the subtype of the message. A Content-Type header of multipart/_subtype will be added to the message object. A MIME-Version header will also be added.

Optional boundary is the multipart boundary string. When None (the default), the boundary is calculated when needed (for example, when the message is serialized).

_subparts is a sequence of initial subparts for the payload. It must be possible to convert this sequence to a list. You can always attach new subparts to the message by using the Message.attach() method.

Additional parameters for the Content-Type header are taken from the keyword arguments, or passed into the _params argument, which is a keyword dictionary.

New in version 2.2.2:

New in version 2.2.2.