Trailing Equal Signs (=) In Emails

I download messages from a Gmail account using POP3 and save them in a SQLite database for futher processing: mailbox = poplib.POP3_SSL('pop.gmail.com', '995') mailbox.user(user)

Solution 1:

Frederic's link lead me to the answer. The encoding is called "quoted printable" (wiki) and it's possible to decode it using the quopri Python module (documentation):

msg.decode('quopri').decode('utf-8')

Solution 2:

Update for python 3.x

You now have to invoke the codecs module.

import codecs
bytes_msg = bytes(msg, 'utf-8')
decoded_msg = codecs.decode(bytes_msg, 'quopri').decode('utf-8')