We just open sourced Flanker, our Python email address and Mime parsing library

Note that MIME is also used for multipart uploads. I&#x27;m currently still using the builtin-parser.<p>Looking at a 100mb multipart upload I can see that email module takes 3.7s and allocates 265 extra MB to parse it, while flanker.mime takes 0.22s and allocates 0.2mb extra memory.

I&#x27;m working on a new email platform,[1] and we&#x27;ve been testing Flanker quite a bit. It&#x27;s awesome!<p>Dealing with MIME has always been an issue in Python, and the last move was Zed Shaw&#x27;s Lamson project a few years ago. The native email.parser module is crazy slow once you start doing heavy processing.<p>Flanker&#x27;s addresslib also is a no-brainer to use. These are the sorts of things which should be bundled with the Python email module.<p>Thanks for open sourcing them!<p>--<p>[1] This isn&#x27;t announced yet, and will deserve a much longer post. You can sign-up for news here: <a href="https://www.inboxapp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inboxapp.com</a>.

Hi All!<p>Mailgunners will be hanging around in comments, ready to answer any questions, should you have any.

I am in two minds - eight years ago and more we were all desperate for a good mail handling library. Now, I hardly seem to have a use for automated mailings that is not handled by Mailchimp (sorry!) or I just want to fire off HTTP calls to some API to mail custom mailings for me (which is I think what you guys do)<p>In short email is probably more important to my business (even with my paltry list numbers) but I no longer run a mail server, anywhere, I do not even have a local mail client unless you count JavaScript.<p>I&#x27;m wondering if I am trading off vulnerability for ease at the wrong places.<p>... hmmm a little unfocused I am afraid but I really have not made any explicit strategic decisions over email but even so, my whole mail handling has altered.<p>I just am surprised I have not noticed how big a step it has been.

Github repo for the lazies: <a href="https://github.com/mailgun/flanker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mailgun&#x2F;flanker</a>

BTW, it took us a while to make sure we deploy right from pip on production, that means that community will get all the latest hotfixes and the github repo won&#x27;t be stale as it&#x27;s not just the mirror or one time copy.

Jeffrey Steadfast discusses the edge cases of MIME parsing and performance optimizations in his MIT&#x2F;X11 C# library here: <a href="http://jeffreystedfast.blogspot.com/2013/10/optimization-tips-tricks-used-by.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jeffreystedfast.blogspot.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;optimization-tip...</a><p>I appreciate how the Flanker release includes benchmarks without thrashing on alternative implementations.

Wonderful, thank you for releasing this! I hope you guys continue to release good bits for handling email, it really is a bear. The ongoing joke in Zapier is a small library that I made called simple_imap. Well, as the story goes, it quickly became anything but simple...<p>Where is the python-requests for email? I will seriously buy someone as much beer they can consume in an evening if such a thing exists!

As an aside, I use MailGun with the Linux nullmailer package to send notification emails from my home (and every other, really) server.<p>It&#x27;s a solid service, very easy to configure, with generous free limits (for the five emails a month my server sends) and with a very nice UI. Props to the team.

This is great guys. It&#x27;s surprising that you&#x27;re able to get an 8x-20x speedup over email.parser with another pure python parser. (What does this say about email.parser, eh?)<p>Did you consider using a C extension and tools like lex or ragel for the rfc822 scanning phase? Not worth it?

I&#x27;ve been using Guardpost in production for the past few months, and it works really well. I&#x27;m curious to see the internals. Thanks for this!

Great work mailgunners!<p>Where does the project name (Flanker) come from?