[Python-Dev] email package status in 3.X (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri Jun 18 07:52:17 CEST 2010

lutz at rmi.net writes:

FWIW, after rewriting Programming Python for 3.1, 3.x still feels a lot like a beta to me, almost 2 years after its release.

Email, of course, is a big wart. But guess what? Python 2's email module doesn't actually work! Sure, the program runs most of the time, but every program that depends on email must acquire inches of armorplate against all the things that can go wrong. You simply can't rely on it to DTRT except in a pre-MIME, pre-HTML, ASCII-only world. Although they're often addressing general problems, these hacks are not integrated back into the email module in most cases, but remain app-specific voodoo.

If you live in Kansas, sure, you can concentrate on dodging tornados and completely forget about Unicode and MIME and text/bogus content. For the rest of the world, though, the problem is not Python 3. It's STD 11 (which still points at RFC 822, dated 1982!) It's really inappropriate to point at the email module, whose developers are trying not to punt on conformance and robustness, when even the IETF can only "run in circles, scream and shout"!

Maybe there are other problems with Python 3 that deserve to be pointed at, but given the general scarcity of resources I think the email module developers are working on the right things. Unlike many other modules, email really needs to be rewritten from the ground (Python 3) up, because of the centrality of bytes/unicode confusion to all email problems. Python 3 completely changes the assumptions there; a Python 2-style email module really can't work properly.

Then on top of that, today we know a lot more about handling issues like text/html content and MIME in general than when the Python 2 email module was designed. New problems have arisen over the period of Python 3 development, like "domain keys", which email doesn't handle out of the box AFAIK, but email for Python 3 should IMHO.

Should Python 3 have been held back until email was fixed? Dunno, but I personally am very glad it was not; where I have a choice, I always use Python 3 now, and have yet to run into a problem. I expect that to change if I can find the time to get involved in email and Mailman 3 development, of course.

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