Skip to content

eml_parser

Code Health Travis CI Documentation Status PyPI PyPI pyversions

eml_parser serves as a python module for parsing eml files and returning various information found in the e-mail as well as computed information.

Extracted and generated information include but are not limited to:

  • attachments
  • hashes
  • names
  • from, to, cc
  • received servers path
  • subject
  • list of URLs parsed from the text content of the mail (including HTML body/attachments)

Please feel free to send me your comments / pull requests.

For the changelog, please see CHANGELOG.md.

Installation

pip install eml_parser[filemagic]

Note

If you don't want to / cannot use file-magic (e.g. if you are using python-magic), install via:

pip install eml_parser

Danger

Note for OSX users:

Make sure to install libmagic, else eml_parser will not work.

Known Issues

OSX users

Make sure to install libmagic, else eml_parser will not work.

Python <=3.7.4 "rare header field parsing issue"

It has been reported (in #60) that there are parsing issues in some particular cases which seem to be caused by a bug in the email module of the Python standard library. At least versions <=3.7.4 are affected.

Python versions >=3.7.11 are not affected. If you do get KeyError exceptions on header field parsing, you should consider upgrading to a more recent version of Python.

-> Please open an issue if the error persists after upgrading.

Example usage

import datetime
import json
import eml_parser


def json_serial(obj):
  if isinstance(obj, datetime.datetime):
      serial = obj.isoformat()
      return serial


with open('sample.eml', 'rb') as fhdl:
  raw_email = fhdl.read()

ep = eml_parser.EmlParser()
parsed_eml = ep.decode_email_bytes(raw_email)

print(json.dumps(parsed_eml, default=json_serial))

Which gives for a minimalistic EML file something like this:

  {
    "body": [
      {
        "content_header": {
          "content-language": [
            "en-US"
          ]
        },
        "hash": "6c9f343bdb040e764843325fc5673b0f43a021bac9064075d285190d6509222d"
      }
    ],
    "header": {
      "received_src": null,
      "from": "john.doe@example.com",
      "to": [
        "test@example.com"
      ],
      "subject": "Sample EML",
      "received_foremail": [
        "test@example.com"
      ],
      "date": "2013-04-26T11:15:47+00:00",
      "header": {
        "content-language": [
          "en-US"
        ],
        "received": [
          "from localhost\tby mta.example.com (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 6388F684168\tfor <test@example.com>; Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:15:55 +0200"
        ],
        "to": [
          "test@example.com"
        ],
        "subject": [
          "Sample EML"
        ],
        "date": [
          "Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:15:47 +0000"
        ],
        "message-id": [
          "<F96257F63EAEB94C890EA6CE1437145C013B01FA@example.com>"
        ],
        "from": [
          "John Doe <john.doe@example.com>"
        ]
      },
      "received_domain": [
        "mta.example.com"
      ],
      "received": [
        {
          "with": "esmtps id 6388f684168",
          "for": [
            "test@example.com"
          ],
          "by": [
            "mta.example.com"
          ],
          "date": "2013-04-26T13:15:55+02:00",
          "src": "from localhost by mta.example.com (postfix) with esmtps id 6388f684168 for <test@example.com>; fri, 26 apr 2013 13:15:55 +0200"
        }
      ]
    }
  }