I am missing a non-hidden equivalent of email._parseaddr.AddressList.
AddressList was retained from the former rfc822 module and is still used internally.

Yes, there is email.utils but for what I know, with the provided functionality it is not possible to parse a comma separated list of email addresses (ex. "a@example.com, b@example.com").

Since RFC5322 allow commas in the local part [1], one cannot simply split a list of email addresses by comma and use email.utils.getaddresses.

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-3.2.3

No, but you can do this:

  >>> utils.getaddresses(['a@example.com, b@example.com'])
  [('', 'a@example.com'), ('', 'b@example.com')]

Not the worlds most intuitive API, I know...which is why we have implemented a new improved API.  In 3.3, by using the new (provisional) policies, you can get a parsed list of addresses right from the Message object, without having to do any further processing yourself:

  >>> import email.policy
  >>> m = email.message_from_string('To: a@example.com, b@example.com\n\n', policy=email.policy.default)
  >>> m['to']
  'a@example.com, b@example.com'
  >>> m['to'].addresses
  (Address(display_name='', username='a', domain='example.com'), Address(display_name='', username='b', domain='example.com'))

This new code is not as battle tested as the old code, so I need people to try using it in order to find the bugs :)

Ah, obviously! :)

Thanks for your rapid and enlightening answer. Now, at least, this feature is documented and can be found by others.

Best!