Hello everyone,

Today I stumbled over unexpected behaviour when parsing emails with Python 3.5.

mail is of type: <class 'email.message.EmailMessage'>

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "XXX", line YYY, in ZZZ
for attachment in mail.iter_attachments():
File "/usr/lib/python3.5/email/message.py", line 1025, in iter_attachments
parts = self.get_payload().copy()
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'copy'

/usr/lib/python3.5/email/message.py calls self.get_payload().copy() without distinguishing between different possible return types of get_payload().

get_payload() belongs to class MIMEPart(Message)

From the (base) class Message:

"def get_payload(self, i=None, decode=False):
"""Return a reference to the payload.

The payload will either be a list object or a string."

So, it might return a string, which seems to be the case I'm hitting here.

The code in cpython trunk still looks identical apart from a few line offsets, so newer versions might be affected, too.

Am I doing something wrong or do we have a bug to squash here?

Thanks,
Sven

Hey Sven,

New here, decided to try a bit at an issue.

According to the email.message docs, "the payload is either a string or bytes object, in the case of simple message objects, or a list of EmailMessage objects, for MIME container documents such as multipart/* and message/rfc822 message objects."

Like you said, this error happens if the email.message.EmailMessage object is bad, i.e. the payload is a string or bytes but the content-type is marked as multipart/*. After reading online, it seems like an error is necessary.

I've proposed a small change in a pull request to make this situation raise a more useful error. It doesn't blow up any earlier but it at least says something more useful.

The function could return instead of throwing an error, just providing an empty iterator, but that seems even less useful.

I fixed it on master (3.8 dev or whatever).

Best,
Brad

New changeset 0225701 by Barry Warsaw (Abhilash Raj) in branch 'master':
bpo-33972: Fix EmailMessage.iter_attachments raising AttributeError. (GH-14119)
0225701

New changeset c6e3282 by Miss Islington (bot) (Abhilash Raj) in branch '3.8':
[3.8] bpo-33972: Fix EmailMessage.iter_attachments raising AttributeError (GH-14119) (GH-14380)
c6e3282

New changeset 01b2394 by Miss Islington (bot) (Abhilash Raj) in branch '3.7':
[3.7] bpo-33972: Fix EmailMessage.iter_attachments raising AttributeError. (GH-14119) (GH-14381)
01b2394

This seems complete, can it be closed?

Thank you all for the fix. Closing.

The problem still occurs with the _find_body
method. The "part.is_attachment()" method can trigger an AttributeError too "AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'is_attachment'"

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.9/Lib/email/message.py#L978

Xavier, I think it would be best if you could open a new issue for that, and also include code to reproduce the problem.