I'm building a system that reads emails from a gmail account and fetches the subjects, using Python's imaplib and email modules. Sometimes, emails received from a hotmail account have line breaks in their headers, for instance:
In [4]: message['From']
Out[4]: '=?utf-8?B?aXNhYmVsIG1hcsOtYSB0b2Npbm8gZ2FyY8OtYQ==?=\r\n\t<isatocino22@hotmail.com>'
If I try to decode that header, it does nothing:
In [5]: email.header.decode_header(message['From'])
Out[5]: [('=?utf-8?B?aXNhYmVsIG1hcsOtYSB0b2Npbm8gZ2FyY8OtYQ==?=\r\n\t<isatocino22@hotmail.com>', None)]
However, if I replace the line break and tab with a space, it works:
In [6]: email.header.decode_header(message['From'].replace('\r\n\t', ' '))
Out[6]: [('isabel mar\xc3\xada tocino garc\xc3\xada', 'utf-8'), ('<isatocino22@hotmail.com>', None)]
Is this a bug in decode_header? If not, I would like to know what other special cases like this I should be aware of.