email.policy.Policy

class email.policy.Policy(**kw)

This is the abstract base class for all policy classes. It provides default implementations for a couple of trivial methods, as well as the implementation of the immutability property, the clone() method, and the constructor semantics.

The constructor of a policy class can be passed various keyword arguments. The arguments that may be specified are any non-method properties on this class, plus any additional non-method properties on the concrete class. A value specified in the constructor will override the default value for the corresponding attribute.

This class defines the following properties, and thus values for the following may be passed in the constructor of any policy class:

max_line_length

The maximum length of any line in the serialized output, not counting the end of line character(s). Default is 78, per RFC 5322. A value of 0 or None indicates that no line wrapping should be done at all.

linesep

The string to be used to terminate lines in serialized output. The default is \n because that’s the internal end-of-line discipline used by Python, though \r\n is required by the RFCs.

cte_type

Controls the type of Content Transfer Encodings that may be or are required to be used. The possible values are:

7bit	all data must be “7 bit clean” (ASCII-only). This means that where necessary data will be encoded using either quoted-printable or base64 encoding.
8bit	data is not constrained to be 7 bit clean. Data in headers is still required to be ASCII-only and so will be encoded (see ‘binary_fold’ below for an exception), but body parts may use the 8bit CTE.

A cte_type value of 8bit only works with BytesGenerator, not Generator, because strings cannot contain binary data. If a Generator is operating under a policy that specifies cte_type=8bit, it will act as if cte_type is 7bit.

raise_on_defect

If True, any defects encountered will be raised as errors. If False (the default), defects will be passed to the register_defect() method.

mangle_from_

If True, lines starting with “From “ in the body are escaped by putting a > in front of them. This parameter is used when the message is being serialized by a generator. Default: False.

New in version 3.5: The mangle_from_ parameter.

The following Policy method is intended to be called by code using the email library to create policy instances with custom settings:

clone(**kw)

Return a new Policy instance whose attributes have the same values as the current instance, except where those attributes are given new values by the keyword arguments.

The remaining Policy methods are called by the email package code, and are not intended to be called by an application using the email package. A custom policy must implement all of these methods.

handle_defect(obj, defect)

Handle a defect found on obj. When the email package calls this method, defect will always be a subclass of Defect.

The default implementation checks the raise_on_defect flag. If it is True, defect is raised as an exception. If it is False (the default), obj and defect are passed to register_defect().

register_defect(obj, defect)

Register a defect on obj. In the email package, defect will always be a subclass of Defect.

The default implementation calls the append method of the defects attribute of obj. When the email package calls handle_defect, obj will normally have a defects attribute that has an append method. Custom object types used with the email package (for example, custom Message objects) should also provide such an attribute, otherwise defects in parsed messages will raise unexpected errors.

header_max_count(name)

Return the maximum allowed number of headers named name.

Called when a header is added to a Message object. If the returned value is not 0 or None, and there are already a number of headers with the name name equal to the value returned, a ValueError is raised.

Because the default behavior of Message.__setitem__ is to append the value to the list of headers, it is easy to create duplicate headers without realizing it. This method allows certain headers to be limited in the number of instances of that header that may be added to a Message programmatically. (The limit is not observed by the parser, which will faithfully produce as many headers as exist in the message being parsed.)

The default implementation returns None for all header names.

header_source_parse(sourcelines)

The email package calls this method with a list of strings, each string ending with the line separation characters found in the source being parsed. The first line includes the field header name and separator. All whitespace in the source is preserved. The method should return the (name, value) tuple that is to be stored in the Message to represent the parsed header.

If an implementation wishes to retain compatibility with the existing email package policies, name should be the case preserved name (all characters up to the ‘:‘ separator), while value should be the unfolded value (all line separator characters removed, but whitespace kept intact), stripped of leading whitespace.

sourcelines may contain surrogateescaped binary data.

There is no default implementation

header_store_parse(name, value)

The email package calls this method with the name and value provided by the application program when the application program is modifying a Message programmatically (as opposed to a Message created by a parser). The method should return the (name, value) tuple that is to be stored in the Message to represent the header.

If an implementation wishes to retain compatibility with the existing email package policies, the name and value should be strings or string subclasses that do not change the content of the passed in arguments.

There is no default implementation

header_fetch_parse(name, value)

The email package calls this method with the name and value currently stored in the Message when that header is requested by the application program, and whatever the method returns is what is passed back to the application as the value of the header being retrieved. Note that there may be more than one header with the same name stored in the Message; the method is passed the specific name and value of the header destined to be returned to the application.

value may contain surrogateescaped binary data. There should be no surrogateescaped binary data in the value returned by the method.

There is no default implementation

fold(name, value)

The email package calls this method with the name and value currently stored in the Message for a given header. The method should return a string that represents that header “folded” correctly (according to the policy settings) by composing the name with the value and inserting linesep characters at the appropriate places. See RFC 5322 for a discussion of the rules for folding email headers.

value may contain surrogateescaped binary data. There should be no surrogateescaped binary data in the string returned by the method.

fold_binary(name, value)

The same as fold(), except that the returned value should be a bytes object rather than a string.

value may contain surrogateescaped binary data. These could be converted back into binary data in the returned bytes object.