Decoding emails in Python e.g. for GMail and imapclient lib

gistfile1.py

import email

def get_decoded_email_body(message_body):
    """ Decode email body.

    Detect character set if the header is not set.

    We try to get text/plain, but if there is not one then fallback to text/html.

    :param message_body: Raw 7-bit message body input e.g. from imaplib. Double encoded in quoted-printable and latin-1

    :return: Message body as unicode string
    """

    msg = email.message_from_string(message_body)

    text = ""
    if msg.is_multipart():
        html = None
        for part in msg.get_payload():

            print "%s, %s" % (part.get_content_type(), part.get_content_charset())

            if part.get_content_charset() is None:
                # We cannot know the character set, so return decoded "something"
                text = part.get_payload(decode=True)
                continue

            charset = part.get_content_charset()

            if part.get_content_type() == 'text/plain':
                text = unicode(part.get_payload(decode=True), str(charset), "ignore").encode('utf8', 'replace')

            if part.get_content_type() == 'text/html':
                html = unicode(part.get_payload(decode=True), str(charset), "ignore").encode('utf8', 'replace')

        if text is not None:
            return text.strip()
        else:
            return html.strip()
    else:
        text = unicode(msg.get_payload(decode=True), msg.get_content_charset(), 'ignore').encode('utf8', 'replace')
        return text.strip()