Is it possible to check if an email contains an attachement just from the e-mail header?

Question

I am developing an email client in Python.

Is it possible to check if an email contains an attachement just from the e-mail header without downloading the whole E-Mail?

Answer 1

"attachment" is quite a broad term. Is an image for HTML message an attachment?

In general, you can try analyzing content-type header. If it's multipart/mixed, most likely the message contains an attachment.

Answer 2

Try IMAP4.fetch(message_set, "BODYSTRUCTURE")

Read the RFC3501 for details about the FETCH BODYSTRUCTURE response.