Python IMAP: =?utf-8?Q? in subject string

I am displaying new email with IMAP, and everything looks fine, except for one message subject shows as:

=?utf-8?Q?Subject?=

How can I fix it?

In MIME terminology, those encoded chunks are called encoded-words. You can decode them like this:

import email.header
text, encoding = email.header.decode_header('=?utf-8?Q?Subject?=')[0]

Check out the docs for email.header for more details.

This is a MIME encoded-word. You can parse it with email.header:

import email.header

def decode_mime_words(s):
    return u''.join(
        word.decode(encoding or 'utf8') if isinstance(word, bytes) else word
        for word, encoding in email.header.decode_header(s))

print(decode_mime_words(u'=?utf-8?Q?Subject=c3=a4?=X=?utf-8?Q?=c3=bc?='))

The text is encoded as a MIME encoded-word. This is a mechanism defined in RFC2047 for encoding headers that contain non-ASCII text such that the encoded output contains only ASCII characters.

In Python 3.3+, the parsing classes and functions in email.parser automatically decode "encoded words" in headers if their policy argument is set to policy.default

>>> import email
>>> from email import policy

>>> msg = email.message_from_file(open('message.txt'), policy=policy.default)
>>> msg['from']
'Pepé Le Pew <pepe@example.com>'

The parsing classes and functions are:

• email.parser.BytesParser
• email.parser.Parser
• email.message_from_bytes
• email.message_from_binary_file
• email.message_from_string
• email.message_from_file

Confusingly, up to at least Python 3.10, the default policy for these parsing functions is not policy.default, but policy.compat32, which does not decode "encoded words".

>>> msg = email.message_from_file(open('message.txt'))
>>> msg['from']
'=?utf-8?q?Pep=C3=A9?= Le Pew <pepe@example.com>'

Try Imbox

Because imaplib is a very excessive low level library and returns results which are hard to work with

Installation

pip install imbox

Usage

from imbox import Imbox

with Imbox('imap.gmail.com',
        username='username',
        password='password',
        ssl=True,
        ssl_context=None,
        starttls=False) as imbox:

    all_inbox_messages = imbox.messages()
    for uid, message in all_inbox_messages:
        message.subject

In Python 3, decoding this to an approximated string is as easy as:

from email.header import decode_header, make_header

decoded = str(make_header(decode_header("=?utf-8?Q?Subject?=")))

See the documentation of decode_header and make_header.

High level IMAP lib may be useful here: imap_tools

from imap_tools import MailBox, AND

# get list of email subjects from INBOX folder
with MailBox('imap.mail.com').login('test@mail.com', 'pwd', 'INBOX') as mailbox:
    subjects = [msg.subject for msg in mailbox.fetch()]

• Parsed email message attributes
• Query builder for searching emails
• Actions with emails: copy, delete, flag, move, seen
• Actions with folders: list, set, get, create, exists, rename, delete, status
• No dependencies