objects missing from email.mime packaged with Spyder 2.3.8?

[David Sterling]

I'm new to python and Spyder so forgive my ignorance here, but I'm having trouble running a python script that imports some objects from the email module. I'm running Spyder 2.3.8 on MacOS 10.11 with python 2.7. The offending imports are:

import email.mime.multipart

import email.mime.base

import email.mime.text

import email.utils

import email.encoders

In the email.mime that ships with Spyder 2.3.8 I see:

dir(email.mime)

Out[29]: 

['Audio',

 'Base',

 'Image',

 'Message',

 'Multipart',

 'NonMultipart',

 'Text',

 '__builtins__',

 '__doc__',

 '__file__',

 '__loader__',

 '__name__',

 '__package__',

 '__path__']

I have been wrestling with my python path to point Spyder to the site-packages directory that contains the email object with these modules. 

Is there a way to "update" the system packages that Spyder ships with?