Trailing equal signs (=) in emails

Question

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) 
mailbox.pass_(password)

msgnum = mailbox.stat()[0]

for i in range(msgnum):
    msg = '\n'.join(mailbox.retr(i+1)[1])
    save_message(msg, dbmgr)

mailbox.quit()

However, looking in the database, all lines but the last one of the message body (payload) have trailing equal signs. Do you know why this happens?

Abundant

Possible duplicate of How to understand the equal sign '=' symbol in IMAP email text? – Bink

Answer 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')

Abundant

Answer 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')

Potentiometer

confirmed: this works with python 3.x, whereas the accepted answer does not – Transmontane