AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'encode'

[pengu-fr]

Extracted 3 attachments, replacing email.
Append message on IMAP server.
Delete original message.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/pengu/aurore/imap-attachment-extractor/.env/bin/imap_aex", line 11, in
load_entry_point('imap-attachment-extractor', 'console_scripts', 'imap_aex')()
File "/home/pengu/aurore/imap-attachment-extractor/imap_aex.py", line 824, in cli
main(options, defaults)
File "/home/pengu/aurore/imap-attachment-extractor/imap_aex.py", line 816, in main
imap.extract(**extract_kwargs)
File "/home/pengu/aurore/imap-attachment-extractor/imap_aex.py", line 493, in extract
attachment_content = part.get_payload().encode("utf-8")
AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'encode'

[Danamir]

get_payload() returns either a list or string, I thought that in this part of the code only str would be returnable, but it may depend on the mail server and/or the sender mail server.

I tested extensively with Gandi, Zimbra, and Gmail servers ; but I don't have access to other ones.

Without access to the mail or the server provoking the error I will have a hard time debugging.

Could you try to replace attachment_content = part.get_payload().encode("utf-8") line 488 by something like :

                    if isinstance(part.get_payload(), list):
                        attachment_content = part.get_payload(1).encode("utf-8")
                    else:
                        attachment_content = part.get_payload().encode("utf-8")  

But I'm not sure about using only the first part of the payload in this instance ; it could prevent the handling of multiple attachments.

[Danamir]

You can checkout the develop branch to try this solution.

[pengu-fr]

Thank you.
I've tried this :

                if part.is_multipart():
                    attachment_content = part.get_payload()
                else:
                    attachment_content = part.get_payload(True)

And it worked pretty well for about 14Gb (on a 20Gb Gmail account). But it fails again somewhere else, and I gave up (sorry).
But nice work here ! It would need a little more debugging, but it's already pretty usefull !

[Danamir]

No problem, thanks for testing anyway !

It's a pain to develop a tool for mail handling as the protocol is implemented differently by almost every servers. So I got it working for the few servers I use, but it may not be ok for others.