18.4. mailbox — Manipulate mailboxes in various formats

This module defines two classes, Mailbox and Message, for accessing and manipulating on-disk mailboxes and the messages they contain. Mailbox offers a dictionary-like mapping from keys to messages. Message extends the email.message module’s Message class with format-specific state and behavior. Supported mailbox formats are Maildir, mbox, MH, Babyl, and MMDF.

See also

Module email

Represent and manipulate messages.

18.4.1. Mailbox objects

class mailbox.Mailbox

A mailbox, which may be inspected and modified.

The Mailbox class defines an interface and is not intended to be instantiated. Instead, format-specific subclasses should inherit from Mailbox and your code should instantiate a particular subclass.

The Mailbox interface is dictionary-like, with small keys corresponding to messages. Keys are issued by the Mailbox instance with which they will be used and are only meaningful to that Mailbox instance. A key continues to identify a message even if the corresponding message is modified, such as by replacing it with another message.

Messages may be added to a Mailbox instance using the set-like method add() and removed using a del statement or the set-like methods remove() and discard().

Mailbox interface semantics differ from dictionary semantics in some noteworthy ways. Each time a message is requested, a new representation (typically a Message instance) is generated based upon the current state of the mailbox. Similarly, when a message is added to a Mailbox instance, the provided message representation’s contents are copied. In neither case is a reference to the message representation kept by the Mailbox instance.

The default Mailbox iterator iterates over message representations, not keys as the default dictionary iterator does. Moreover, modification of a mailbox during iteration is safe and well-defined. Messages added to the mailbox after an iterator is created will not be seen by the iterator. Messages removed from the mailbox before the iterator yields them will be silently skipped, though using a key from an iterator may result in a KeyError exception if the corresponding message is subsequently removed.

Warning

Be very cautious when modifying mailboxes that might be simultaneously changed by some other process. The safest mailbox format to use for such tasks is Maildir; try to avoid using single-file formats such as mbox for concurrent writing. If you’re modifying a mailbox, you must lock it by calling the lock() and unlock() methods before reading any messages in the file or making any changes by adding or deleting a message. Failing to lock the mailbox runs the risk of losing messages or corrupting the entire mailbox.

Mailbox instances have the following methods:

add(message)

Add message to the mailbox and return the key that has been assigned to it.

Parameter message may be a Message instance, an email.message.Message instance, a string, or a file-like object (which should be open in text mode). If message is an instance of the appropriate format-specific Message subclass (e.g., if it’s an mboxMessage instance and this is an mbox instance), its format-specific information is used. Otherwise, reasonable defaults for format-specific information are used.

remove(key)

__delitem__(key)

discard(key)

Delete the message corresponding to key from the mailbox.

If no such message exists, a KeyError exception is raised if the method was called as remove() or __delitem__() but no exception is raised if the method was called as discard(). The behavior of discard() may be preferred if the underlying mailbox format supports concurrent modification by other processes.

__setitem__(key, message)

Replace the message corresponding to key with message. Raise a KeyError exception if no message already corresponds to key.

As with add(), parameter message may be a Message instance, an email.message.Message instance, a string, or a file-like object (which should be open in text mode). If message is an instance of the appropriate format-specific Message subclass (e.g., if it’s an mboxMessage instance and this is an mbox instance), its format-specific information is used. Otherwise, the format-specific information of the message that currently corresponds to key is left unchanged.

iterkeys()

keys()

Return an iterator over all keys if called as iterkeys() or return a list of keys if called as keys().

itervalues()

__iter__()

values()

Return an iterator over representations of all messages if called as itervalues() or __iter__() or return a list of such representations if called as values(). The messages are represented as instances of the appropriate format-specific Message subclass unless a custom message factory was specified when the Mailbox instance was initialized.

Note

The behavior of __iter__() is unlike that of dictionaries, which iterate over keys.

iteritems()

items()

Return an iterator over (key, message) pairs, where key is a key and message is a message representation, if called as iteritems() or return a list of such pairs if called as items(). The messages are represented as instances of the appropriate format-specific Message subclass unless a custom message factory was specified when the Mailbox instance was initialized.

get(key, default=None)

__getitem__(key)

Return a representation of the message corresponding to key. If no such message exists, default is returned if the method was called as get() and a KeyError exception is raised if the method was called as __getitem__(). The message is represented as an instance of the appropriate format-specific Message subclass unless a custom message factory was specified when the Mailbox instance was initialized.

get_message(key)

Return a representation of the message corresponding to key as an instance of the appropriate format-specific Message subclass, or raise a KeyError exception if no such message exists.

get_string(key)

Return a string representation of the message corresponding to key, or raise a KeyError exception if no such message exists.

get_file(key)

Return a file-like representation of the message corresponding to key, or raise a KeyError exception if no such message exists. The file-like object behaves as if open in binary mode. This file should be closed once it is no longer needed.

Note

Unlike other representations of messages, file-like representations are not necessarily independent of the Mailbox instance that created them or of the underlying mailbox. More specific documentation is provided by each subclass.

has_key(key)

__contains__(key)

Return True if key corresponds to a message, False otherwise.

__len__()

Return a count of messages in the mailbox.

clear()

Delete all messages from the mailbox.

pop(key[, default])

Return a representation of the message corresponding to key and delete the message. If no such message exists, return default if it was supplied or else raise a KeyError exception. The message is represented as an instance of the appropriate format-specific Message subclass unless a custom message factory was specified when the Mailbox instance was initialized.

popitem()

Return an arbitrary (key, message) pair, where key is a key and message is a message representation, and delete the corresponding message. If the mailbox is empty, raise a KeyError exception. The message is represented as an instance of the appropriate format-specific Message subclass unless a custom message factory was specified when the Mailbox instance was initialized.

update(arg)