PYSEC-2026-3833
eml_parser has parser DoS via deeply nested parentheses in e-mail headers
Quick fix
PYSEC-2026-3833 — eml-parser: upgrade to the fixed version with the command below.
pip install --upgrade 'eml-parser>=3.0.2'Details
### Summary
`eml_parser` uses the `email.utils.getaddresses()` function from the CPython standard library to parse e-mail headers that contain e-mail addresses (such as `To`, `Cc`, `Bcc`, `From`, `Reply-To`, `Sender`, ...). When the input header contains a deeply nested CFWS (comment / folding white space) construct, the recursive descent parser in the standard library exhausts the call stack. The resulting `RecursionError` is not caught by `eml_parser`, so the exception propagates and aborts parsing of the whole message.
### Impact
SOC pipelines use `eml_parser` to process untrusted e-mails. An attacker can easily create an eml file that will trigger the `RecursionError` during parsing.
The impact is mitigated by the fact that there are various other situations in which `eml_parser` will raise an exception when attempting to parse a malformed or pathological eml file. In particular, very deeply nested multipart e-mails also result in a `RecursionError` being raised by the library voluntarily. Therefore, systems relying on `eml_parser` already need to detect and handle errors emanating from the library in an appropriate way.
### Workarounds
The issue can be avoided by wrapping the call to `eml_parser.decode_email` or `eml_parser.decode_email_bytes` in a `try/except` construct.
### Patches
Since version 3.0.2, `eml_parser` will catch the error in the standard library parser and fall back to a simpler parser based on a regular expression.
Are you affected?
Enter the version of the package you're using.
Affected packages
References
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/security/advisories/GHSA-m66c-fw79-6359[WEB]
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/pull/90[WEB]
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/commit/746a69f86443eb0b6a47f77db3cfe727c21f92b3[WEB]
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser[PACKAGE]
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/releases/tag/v3.0.2[WEB]
- https://pypi.org/project/eml-parser[PACKAGE]
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-m66c-fw79-6359[ADVISORY]
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-55619[ADVISORY]