title: Email body is a string sometimes and a list sometimes. Why?
body: <p>My application is written in python. What I am doing is I am running a script on each email received by postfix and do something with the email content. Procmail is responsible for running the script taking the email as input. The problem started when I was converting the input message(may be text) to email_message object(because the latter comes in handy). I am using email.message_from_string (where email is the default email module, comes with python).</p>
  
  
  <code>
  import email
  message = email.message_from_string(original_mail_content)
  message_body = message.get_payload()
  </code>
  
  
  <p>This message_body is sometimes returning a list[email.message.Message instance,email.message.Message instance] and sometime returning a string(actual body content of the incoming email). Why is it. And even I found one more observation. When I was browsing through the email.message.Message.get_payload() docstring, I found this..<br/>
  """
  The payload will either be a list object or a string.If you mutate
  the list object, you modify the message's payload in place....."""  </p>
  
  <p>So how do I have generic method to get the body of email through python? Please help me out.</p>