Q: How can I get actual email address as a string from python email object I have created an email object using python's imaplib:
import email
email_message = email.message_from_string(raw_email)

>>> f = email_message ['From']
>>> f
'"bob smith" <bob5@xxxxx.org>'
>>> import re
>>> re.findall('\$<[^$]*>\$', f)
[]

I want to grab the actual email but the above is not working. How can I do this?

A: I don't know what all the dollar signs are for, but they are not necessary.  What you want to get is conveniently placed inside angle brackets.  So, all you need to do is capture stuff contained in them.  
This can be done with re.search:
>>> from re import search
>>> f = '"bob smith" <bob5@xxxxx.org>'
>>> search('<(.*?)>$', f)
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x0213A520>
>>> search('<(.*?)>$', f).group(1)
'bob5@xxxxx.org'
>>>

Below is a breakdown of the Regex pattern:
<      # <
(.*?)  # Capture group for zero or more characters
>      # >
$      # End of string

