Python email module: form header "From" with some unicode name + email

Question

I'm generating email with the help of Python email module.
Here are few lines of code, which demonstrates my question:

msg = email.MIMEMultipart.MIMEMultipart('alternative')

msg['From'] = "[email protected]"

msg.as_string()

Out[7]: 'Content-Type: multipart/alternative;\n boundary="===============9006870443159801881=="\nMIME-Version: 1.0\nFrom: [email protected]\n\n--===============9006870443159801881==\n\n--===============9006870443159801881==--' 

As you can see, everything is okay here, From field contains email ant it is cool. But what if I want to add some name before email? Especially unicode one:

In [8]: u.get_full_name()
Out[8]: u'\u0414\u0438\u043c\u0430 \u0426\u0443\u043a\u0430\u043d\u043e\u0432'

In [9]: msg = email.MIMEMultipart.MIMEMultipart('alternative')

In [10]: msg['From'] = "%s <%s>" % (u.get_full_name(), "[email protected]")

In [11]: msg.as_string()
Out[11]: 'Content-Type: multipart/alternative;\n boundary="===============5792069034892928634=="\nMIME-Version: 1.0\nFrom: =?utf-8?b?0JTQuNC80LAg0KbRg9C60LDQvdC+0LIgPGVtYWlsQGF0LmNvbT4=?=\n\n--===============5792069034892928634==\n\n--===============5792069034892928634==--'

Here you can see, that all the string (name, email) was encoded in base64 (and it is even quite logical, how MIMEMultipart will know that string contains unicode and non-unicode parts).
So, my question is: how do I have to tell email module to make me pretty "From" header like:
From: =?UTF-8?B?0JLQmtC+0L3RgtCw0LrRgtC1?= <[email protected]> ?

Also, I've learned a little RFC2822 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html , p.3.6.2). It tells:

The originator fields indicate the mailbox(es) of the source of the message. The "From:" field specifies the author(s) of the message, that is, the mailbox(es) of the person(s) or system(s) responsible for the writing of the message. The "Sender:" field specifies the mailbox of the agent responsible for the actual transmission of the message. For example, if a secretary were to send a message for another person, the mailbox of the secretary would appear in the "Sender:" field and the mailbox of the actual author would appear in the "From:" field. If the originator of the message can be indicated by a single mailbox and the author and transmitter are identical, the "Sender:" field SHOULD NOT be used. Otherwise, both fields SHOULD appear.

Does it mean that I should combine these two headers? (From and Sender). I'm a bit confused, because I noticed a lot of emails in my gmail (looking through "Show original") where in From field name and email are presented.

Thanks for help.

Answer 1

You need to encode the name part separately using email.header.Header:

from email.MIMEMultipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.header import Header
from email.utils import formataddr

author = formataddr((str(Header(u'Alał', 'utf-8')), "[email protected]"))
msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
msg['From'] = author
print msg

I hope this will help.