Stably extracting text contents from email messages with Python

Extracting text contents from email messages is a fundamental task in email processing, such as spam mail identifying and email filtering. Although Python is a rapid application development language, there is not a library in Python which can efficiently and stably accomplish this task when facing versatile email formats in a real application. This paper proposes an approach to fulfill the task with three software layers. How to automatically evaluate it in a busy server environment has also been documented. It has been deployed in our email processing platform to extract text content of email messages on 24 hours per day and 7 days per week base. Its stable and effective performance improves our email filtering service to our customers. The principles in the approach can also be adopted to stabilize the performance of other software.