Is there any way to make sense of these E-Mail subjects?

[Chris Green]

I have a Python 3 script which processes E-Mail caught in my hosting
provider's 'catchall' mailbox.  It looks for things that *might* be
useful E-Mails, forwards them, and throws the rest away.

I have a function which, given a header name, extracts the header and
returns it as a string:-

    #
    #
    # Get a message header as a string
    #
    def getHdr(msg, header):
       return str("\n  " + header + ": " + str(msg.get(header, "empty"))) 

msg is a mailbox.mboxMessage object.


This is mostly working as expected, returning the header contents as
strings so I can output them to my log files as necessary.  However
some Subject: lines are being returned like the following:-

      Subject: [SPAM] =?UTF-8?B?8J+TtyBKb2huIEJheHRlci1C?=
     =?UTF-8?B?cm93biByZWNlbnRseSBw?=
     =?UTF-8?B?b3N0ZWQgYSBuZXcgcGhv?=
     =?UTF-8?B?dG8=?=

It looks like some sort of mis-encoding of UTF-8 strings, can anyone
suggest what might be going on and/or a way to get some sense out of
this?

FWIW the above example is from "Facebook" <friendupdates at facebookmail.com>
so while it is probably (as indicated) [SPAM] it shouldn't be so illegible.

At the moment I can't see an easy way to actually inspect the message
as it's disappeared off somewhere else.  I guess I could add some code
to the script to send it to myself as well but if there's something
obvious in the above it would avoid having to do this.


-- 
Chris Green
·