1 Introduction

The email package provides classes and utilities to create, parse, generate, and modify email messages, conforming to all the relevant email and MIME related RFCs.

This document describes the current version of the email package, which is available to Python programmers in a number of ways. Python 2.2.2 and 2.3 come with email version 2, while earlier versions of Python 2.2.x come with email version 1. Python 2.1.x and earlier do not come with any version of the email package.

The email package is also available as a standalone distutils package, and is compatible with Python 2.1.3 and beyond. Thus, if you're using Python 2.1.3 you can download the standalone package and install it in your site-packages directory. The standalone email package is available on the SourceForge mimelib project.

The documentation that follows was written for the Python project, so if you're reading this as part of the standalone email package documentation, there are a few notes to be aware of:

Deprecation and ``version added'' notes are relative to the Python version a feature was added or deprecated. To find out what version of the email package a particular item was added, changed, or removed, refer to the package's NEWS file.
The code samples are written with Python 2.2 in mind. For Python 2.1.3, some adjustments are necessary. For example, this code snippet;
```
      if isinstance(s, str):
          # ...
```
would need to be written this way in Python 2.1.3:
```
      from types import StringType
      # ...
      if isinstance(s, StringType):
          # ...
```
If you're reading this documentation as part of the standalone email package, some of the internal links to other sections of the Python standard library may not resolve.