GMail API Python and Encoding/Decoding

Question

I'm trying to read my GMail messages using the API provided by Google using Python 3.4.

I'm using this function that is provided by Google at this link:

def GetMimeMessage(service, user_id, msg_id):

  try:
    message = service.users().messages().get(userId=user_id, id=msg_id,
                                             format='raw').execute()

    print 'Message snippet: %s' % message['snippet']

    msg_str = base64.urlsafe_b64decode(message['raw'].encode('ASCII'))

    mime_msg = email.message_from_string(msg_str)

    return mime_msg
  except errors.HttpError, error:
    print 'An error occurred: %s' % error

However if I use this function as it is I get the following error:

TypeError: initial_value must be str or None, not bytes

So I changed the function a bit:

def GetMimeMessage(service, user_id, msg_id):
    try:
       message = service.users().messages().get(userId=user_id, id=msg_id,
                                             format='raw').execute()
       #print ('Message snippet: %s' % message['snippet'])

       msg_str = base64.urlsafe_b64decode(message['raw'].encode('utf-8','ignore'))
       print(msg_str)
       mime_msg = email.message_from_string(msg_str.decode('utf-8','ignore'))

       return mime_msg
   except errors.HttpError:
       print('An error occurred')

If I don't add the 'ignore' argument I get the following error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xeb in position 2214: invalid continuation byte

If I use the 'ignore' argument then the content of the mail, for example a HTML text, has some weird characters into it, for example:

=09=09body=2C#bodyTable=2C#bodyCell{

=09=09=09height:100% !important;

=09=09=09margin:0;

=09=09=09padding:0;

=09=09=09width:100% !important;

=09=09}

My problem seems very similar to this one but, given that I'm not a Python expert and I need to use the GMail API, I cannot see how to fix it. Any idea?

Answer 1

It appears that the mail contents are in quote-print codification.

You can use the quopri module to handle it https://docs.python.org/2/library/quopri.html