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

As the other answers already indicate: there is no standard, and your program is not going to be flawless.

You could have a look at the headers, in particular the User-Agent header, to see what kind of client was used, and code specifically for the most common clients.

To find out what clients you should consider to support, have a look at this popularity study. Various Outlooks, Yahoo!, Hotmail, Mail.app, iPhone mail, Gmail and Lotus Notes rank highly. About 11% of the mail is classified as "undetectable", but using headers from the forwarded e-mail you might be able to do better than that. Note that the statistics were gathered by placing an image inside the e-mail, so results may be skewed.

Another problem is HTML mail, which may or may not include a plain-text version. I'm not sure about clients' usual behaviour in this respect.