How to copy the entire outlook message content in Python

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I'm a beginner trying to achieve the below in my python script: Can anyone help me on this? I'm stuck at step2.

1. Input: A locally saved outlook mail (*.msg) path
2. Go to the specific mail file and Copy the entire body of the mail
3. Create a new mail and paste the contents into new mail

What I have tried:

Python

import win32com.client as win32

   ########### Functions
   def getMailBody(msgFile):
       start_text = "<html>"
       end_text = "</html>"
       with open(msgFile) as f:
           data=f.read()
       return data[data.find(start_text):data.find(end_text)+len(end_text)]

   def releaseMail(body, subject, recipient):
       outlook = win32.Dispatch('outlook.application')
       mail = outlook.CreateItem(0)
       mail.To = recipient
       mail.Subject = subject
       mail.HtmlBody = body
       mail.Display(True)

   ############### Main ################
   msgFile = "C:\\RELM\\testMsg.msg"
   mailTo = "mymail@myserver.com"
   mailSubject = "Test message"
   mailBody = getMailBody(msgFile)
   releaseMail(mailBody, mailSubject, mailRecipient)

Below is the error I'm getting.
================================
File "C:\Python\Python38-32\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 23, in decode return codecs.charmap_decode(input,self.errors,decoding_table)[0] UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x81 in position 924: character maps to <undefined>

Posted 29-Dec-20 3:17am

Member 15033078

Updated 27-Nov-22 17:45pm

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Sandeep Mewara · Answer 1 · 2020-12-29T03:43:00

Solution 1

Curious, I looked on web. Everywhere the response was to read with right encoding format to resolve it.

So, instead of open(msgFile), try:

Python

open(msgFile, encoding='utf8')

Similar error solves:
python - UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x81[^]
windows - UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte X [^]

Try out.

Posted 29-Dec-20 3:43am

Sandeep Mewara

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Member 15033078 29-Dec-20 10:52am

@sandeep Mewara
Tried but i didn't work.

Member 15033078 · Answer 2 · 2020-12-29T05:27:00

I modified my function as below and now I can successfully execute the script. But the result mail lost all the original mail format in the body. Now how to retain the original format?

def getMailBody(msgFile):
    outlook = win32.Dispatch('outlook.application').GetNamespace("MAPI")
    msg = outlook.OpenSharedItem(msgFile)
    return msg.Body

Member 15845943 · Answer 3 · 2022-11-27T17:45:00

Solution 3

for message in messages:
    ## Assigning the values
    subject = message.Subject.encode('utf-8')
    subjectS = str(subject)
    body = message.body.encode('utf-8')
    bodyS = str(body)
    znder = message.sender

Then you simply replace all \n with new line feed, and so on.

Posted 27-Nov-22 17:45pm

Member 15845943