Python email module ImportError: No module named utils

Question

My installation of Python's requests library has been working perfectly for months and it has decided to break today.

Python 2.7.6 (default, Jun 22 2015, 17:58:13) 
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import requests
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/__init__.py", line 58, in <module>
    from . import utils
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/utils.py", line 26, in <module>
    from .compat import parse_http_list as _parse_list_header
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/compat.py", line 7, in <module>
    from .packages import chardet
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/packages/__init__.py", line 3, in <module>
    from . import urllib3
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/packages/urllib3/__init__.py", line 10, in <module>
    from .connectionpool import (
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/packages/urllib3/connectionpool.py", line 37, in <module>
    from .request import RequestMethods
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/packages/urllib3/request.py", line 6, in <module>
    from .filepost import encode_multipart_formdata
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/packages/urllib3/filepost.py", line 8, in <module>
    from .fields import RequestField
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/packages/urllib3/fields.py", line 1, in <module>
    import email.utils
ImportError: No module named utils

The trouble calling utils is related to the email module in Python 2.7

>>> import email
>>> import email.utils
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named utils

utils is clearly a part of Python's email library, but it can't be accessed. If I uninstall and reinstall:

$ sudo pip install email

Collecting email
  Downloading email-4.0.2.tar.gz (1.2MB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 1.2MB 286kB/s 
Installing collected packages: email
  Running setup.py install for email
Successfully installed email-4.0.2

Worst of all utils.py is actually present. What am I doing wrong?

$ ls /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/email/
base64mime.py   errors.py       header.py      message.py      parser.pyc
base64mime.pyc  errors.pyc      header.pyc     message.pyc     quoprimime.py
charset.py      feedparser.py   __init__.py    mime            quoprimime.pyc
charset.pyc     feedparser.pyc  __init__.pyc   _parseaddr.py   test
encoders.py     generator.py    iterators.py   _parseaddr.pyc  utils.py
encoders.pyc    generator.pyc   iterators.pyc  parser.py       utils.pyc

Answer 1

Most likely one of your own modules in the module search path (including the current working directory) is actually called email. This will cause Python to pick up that module instead, and it will shadow the email module from the standard library, leading to that import error.

Rename that module to something else, and you should be good.