Issues with B64 decoding

Question

Using the non-mime message.get method, I am pulling out the body/data and trying to decode it in order to simply show the message in english. The problem I am having is that some of the messages decode fine, and then suddenly I get incorrect padding issues. I have tried replacing + and / to no avail.

Why would this be happening and how do I fix it?

Here's my messages.get method:

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

# Pull Raw Message Body from Response
message_raw = message['payload']['parts'][0]['body']['data']

# Decode the raw message
message_decoded = base64.b64decode(message_raw)

# Print the messages
print message_decoded

UPDATES

Service

gmail_service = build('gmail', 'v1', http=http)

Traceback Error

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "gmail.py", line 166, in <module>
GetMessage(gmail_service, 'me', message_id)
File "gmail.py", line 155, in GetMessage
message_decoded = base64.b64decode(message_raw)
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/base64.py",        line 76, in b64decode
raise TypeError(msg)
TypeError: Incorrect padding

Traceback error when using urlsafe

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "gmail.py", line 166, in <module>
GetMessage(gmail_service, 'me', message_id)
File "gmail.py", line 155, in GetMessage
message_decoded = base64.urlsafe_b64decode(message_raw)
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/base64.py", line 112, in urlsafe_b64decode
return b64decode(s, '-_')
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/base64.py", line 71, in b64decode
s = _translate(s, {altchars[0]: '+', altchars[1]: '/'})
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/base64.py", line 36, in _translate
return s.translate(''.join(translation)) 
TypeError: character mapping must return integer, None or unicode

Answer 1

You need to use:

message_decoded = base64.urlsafe_b64decode(message_raw)

since the raw message is URLSafe base64 encoded.