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# 18.9. `mimify` — MIME processing of mail messages

Deprecated since version 2.3: The `email` package should be used in preference to the `mimify` module. This module is present only to maintain backward compatibility.

The `mimify` module defines two functions to convert mail messages to and from MIME format. The mail message can be either a simple message or a so-called multipart message. Each part is treated separately. Mimifying (a part of) a message entails encoding the message as quoted-printable if it contains any characters that cannot be represented using 7-bit ASCII. Unmimifying (a part of) a message entails undoing the quoted-printable encoding. Mimify and unmimify are especially useful when a message has to be edited before being sent. Typical use would be:

    unmimify message
    edit message
    mimify message
    send message

The modules defines the following user-callable functions and user-settable variables:

`mimify.``mimify`(infile, outfile)

  Copy the message in infile to outfile, converting parts to quoted-printable and adding MIME mail headers when necessary. infile and outfile can be file objects (actually, any object that has a `readline()` method (for infile) or a `write()` method (for outfile)) or strings naming the files. If infile and outfile are both strings, they may have the same value.

`mimify.``unmimify`(infile, outfile[, decode_base64])

  Copy the message in infile to outfile, decoding all quoted-printable parts. infile and outfile can be file objects (actually, any object that has a `readline()` method (for infile) or a `write()` method (for outfile)) or strings naming the files. If infile and outfile are both strings, they may have the same value. If the decode_base64 argument is provided and tests true, any parts that are coded in the base64 encoding are decoded as well.

`mimify.``mime_decode_header`(line)

  Return a decoded version of the encoded header line in line. This only supports the ISO 8859-1 charset (Latin-1).

`mimify.``mime_encode_header`(line)

  Return a MIME-encoded version of the header line in line.

`mimify.``MAXLEN`

  By default, a part will be encoded as quoted-printable when it contains any non-ASCII characters (characters with the 8th bit set), or if there are any lines longer than `MAXLEN` characters (default value 200).

`mimify.``CHARSET`

  When not specified in the mail headers, a character set must be filled in. The string used is stored in `CHARSET`, and the default value is ISO-8859-1 (also known as Latin1 (latin-one)).

This module can also be used from the command line. Usage is as follows:

    mimify.py -e [-l length] [infile [outfile]]
    mimify.py -d [-b] [infile [outfile]]

to encode (mimify) and decode (unmimify) respectively. infile defaults to standard input, outfile defaults to standard output. The same file can be specified for input and output.

If the -l option is given when encoding, if there are any lines longer than the specified length, the containing part will be encoded.

If the -b option is given when decoding, any base64 parts will be decoded as well.

See also

Module `quopri`
  Encode and decode MIME quoted-printable files.