2.12 Differences from mimelib

The email package was originally prototyped as a separate library called mimelib. Changes have been made so that method names are more consistent, and some methods or modules have either been added or removed. The semantics of some of the methods have also changed. For the most part, any functionality available in mimelib is still available in the email package, albeit often in a different way. Backward compatibility between the mimelib package and the email package was not a priority.

Here is a brief description of the differences between the mimelib and the email packages, along with hints on how to port your applications.

Of course, the most visible difference between the two packages is that the package name has been changed to email. In addition, the top-level package has the following differences:

The Message class has the following differences:

The Parser class has no differences in its public interface. It does have some additional smarts to recognize message/delivery-status type messages, which it represents as a Message instance containing separate Message subparts for each header block in the delivery status notification3.

The Generator class has no differences in its public interface. There is a new class in the email.Generator module though, called DecodedGenerator which provides most of the functionality previously available in the Message.getpayloadastext() method.

The following modules and classes have been changed:

mimelib provided some utility functions in its address and date modules. All of these functions have been moved to the email.Utils module.

The MsgReader class/module has been removed. Its functionality is most closely supported in the body_line_iterator() function in the email.Iterators module.



Footnotes

... notification3
Delivery Status Notifications (DSN) are defined in RFC 1894.