Parsing forwarded emails

Question

I\'m writing some code to parse forwarded emails. What I\'m not sure is if maybe there is some Python library, some RFC I could stick to or some other resou

Answer 1

Unlike what many other people said, there is a standard on forwarded emails, RFC 2046, "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media Types", more than ten years old. See specially its section 5.2, "Message Media Type".

The basic idea behind RFC 2046 is to encapsulate one message into the MIME part of another, of type named (unfortunately) message/rfc822 (never forget that MIME is recursive). The MIME library of Python can handle it fine.

I did not downvote the other answers because they are right in one respect: the standard is not followed by every mailer. For instance, the mutt mailer can forward a message in RFC 2046 format but also in a adhoc format. So, in practice, a mailer probably cannot handle only RFC 2046, it also has to parse the various others and underspecified syntaxes.