email -- a mail and MIME handling package
Copyright (C) 2001 Python Software Foundation


Introduction

    The email package is a library for managing email messages,
    including MIME and other RFC 2822-based message documents.  It is
    intended to replace most of the functionality in several older
    standard modules such as rfc822, mimetools, multifile, mimify, and
    MIMEWriter, and other non-standard packages such as mimecntl.  It
    is compliant with most of the email related RFCs such as 2045-2047
    (the MIME RFCs) and 2231.

    This version is identical to the package available in the Python
    2.3 cvs development tree.  It is being made available as a
    standalone distutils package for use in older Python releases.  A
    minimum of Python 2.1 is required.  Because the email package is
    now part of Python, it is covered by the PSF license for Python,
    as described in the LICENSE.txt file.


Testing

    To test the email package, run the standard unit test suite from
    the directory that you unpacked the source in (i.e. the directory
    containing the setup.py file and this README file):

    % python testall.py

    You should see a couple of lines of dots followed by the number of
    tests ran and the time the tests took.  The test should end with
    an "OK".  If so, you're good to go.  Note that the exact number of
    tests depends on such things as whether you have the Japanese
    codecs installed or not.

Documentation and Examples

    Documentation is provided in PDF, PostScript, and HTML form.  See
    the docs directory for details.

    If you're looking for examples, you might want to check out some
    of the tests.  There are a few examples in the documentation as
    well.


Installing

    To install simply execute the following at your shell prompt:

    % python setup.py install


Acknowledgements

    A big thanks goes to Ben Gertzfield who implemented the bulk of
    the multibyte support in version 1.1, as well as the RFC compliant
    base64 and quoted-printable modules.

    Many thanks to these other fine folks for providing code
    contributions or examples, suggestions, bug reports, feedback,
    encouragement, etc.

    Anthony Baxter
    Martin Bless
    Oleg Broytmann
    Matthew Dixon Cowles
    Jeff Dairiki
    Quinn Dunkan
    David Given
    Phil Hunt
    Sheila King
    Martin Koch
    Jason Mastaler
    Andrew McNamara
    Skip Montanaro
    Guido van Rossum

    Apologies to anybody I've left out (let me know!).


Contacting the author

    Barry Warsaw
    barry@zope.com
    Zope Corporation
    Pythonlabs Team
    http://barry.wooz.org
