Why Gmail doesn't display my RFC 2047-encoded From header?

Question

My Python application uses email.header.Header (http://docs.python.org/2/library/email.header.html ) to encode all headers of outgoing email (including From header), just like indicated here: Encoding mail subject (SMTP) in Python with non-ASCII characters

It works perfectly for ASCII sender names, but for senders like

Adrian Płonka <pokemon@myservice.com>

it produces

From: =?utf-8?q?Adrian_P=C5=82onka_=3Cpokemon=40myservice=2Ecom=3E?=

Unfortunately, Gmail apparently doesn't like this way of encoding as it displays the sender as (unknown) and marks the whole message as Spam.

How do I properly encode non-ASCII senders?

Answer 1

The proper way to encode that is

From: =?utf-8?q?Adrian_P=C5=82onka?= <pokemon@myservice.com>

That is, only the name part, not the actual email terminus, may be RFC2047-encoded.

Answer 2

The most elegant way I can think of in order to achieve the outcome from @tripleee's answer would be:

message['From'] = formataddr((charset.header_encode('Adrian Płonka'), 'pokemon@myservice.com'))

where charset is an email.charset.Charset object, I created with:

charset = email.charset.Charset()
charset.body_encoding = email.charset.QP
charset.header_encoding = email.charset.QP
charset.input_charset = 'utf-8'
charset.output_charset = 'utf-8'
charset.input_codec = 'utf-8'
charset.output_codec = 'utf-8'

It displays correctly with Gmail as well as with other providers.

This was non-trivial for me to find, hope it helps...