Email

The usability of the :mod:`email` package in Python 3 has been mostly fixed by

the extensive efforts of R. David Murray. The problem was that emails are

typically read and stored in the form of :class:`bytes` rather than :class:`str`

text, and they may contain multiple encodings within a single email. So, the

email package had to be extended to parse and generate email messages in bytes

format.

* New functions :func:`~email.message_from_bytes` and

:func:`~email.message_from_binary_file`, and new classes

:class:`~email.parser.BytesFeedParser` and :class:`~email.parser.BytesParser`

allow binary message data to be parsed into model objects.

* Given bytes input to the model, :meth:`~email.message.Message.get_payload`

will by default decode a message body that has a

:mailheader:`Content-Transfer-Encoding` of *8bit* using the charset

specified in the MIME headers and return the resulting string.

* Given bytes input to the model, :class:`~email.generator.Generator` will

convert message bodies that have a :mailheader:`Content-Transfer-Encoding` of

*8bit* to instead have a *7bit* :mailheader:`Content-Transfer-Encoding`.

* A new class :class:`~email.generator.BytesGenerator` produces bytes as output,

preserving any unchanged non-ASCII data that was present in the input used to

build the model, including message bodies with a

:mailheader:`Content-Transfer-Encoding` of *8bit*.

* The :mod:`smtplib` :class:`~smtplib.SMTP` class now accepts a byte string

for the *msg* argument to the :meth:`~smtplib.SMTP.sendmail` method,

and a new method, :meth:`~smtplib.SMTP.send_message` accepts a

:class:`~email.message.Message` object and can optionally obtain the

*from_addr* and *to_addrs* addresses directly from the object.

* The :attr:`Connection.in_transit` attribute is true if there is an active

transaction for uncommitted changes.

* The :meth:`Connection.enable_load_extension` and

:meth:`Connection.load_extension` methods allows you to load SQLite extensions

from ".so" files. One well-known extension is the fulltext-search extension

distributed with SQLite.

The integer methods in the :mod:`random` module now do a better job of

producing uniform distributions. Previously, they used ``int(n*random())``

which had a slight bias whenever *n* was not a power of two. The methods

affected are :meth:`~random.Random.randrange`, :meth:`~random.Random.randint`,

:meth:`~random.Random.choice`, :meth:`~random.Random.shuffle` and

:meth:`~random.Random.sample`.

* The :mod:`inspect` module has a new function :func:`getgenatorstate` to easily

identify the current state of a generator as one of ``GEN_CREATED``,

``GEN_RUNNING``, ``GEN_SUSPENDED`` or ``GEN_CLOSED``. (Contributed by Rodolpho

Eckhardt and Nick Coghlan, :issue:`10220`.)