You can use re.sub to replace the first few commas with, say, the '|', save the intermediate results in a StringIO then process that.

import pandas as pd
from io import StringIO
import re

for_pd = StringIO()
with open('MikeS159.csv') as mike:
    for line in mike:
        new_line = re.sub(r',', '|', line.rstrip(), count=7)
        print (new_line, file=for_pd)

for_pd.seek(0)

df = pd.read_csv(for_pd, sep='|', header=None)
print (df)

I put the two lines from your question into a file to get this output.

       0       1  2                    3  4  5   6  \
0  061AE  Active  1  2017_02_24 15_18_01  6  1  13   
1  061AE  Active  1  2017_02_24 15_18_01  6  1  13   

                             7  
0                 some message  
1  longer message, with commas  

You can use the parameter usecols in the read_csv function to limit what columns you read in. For example:

import pandas as pd
pd.read_csv(path, usecols=range(8))

if you only want to read the first 8 columns.

You can take a shot at this roundabout posted on the Pandas issues page:

import csv
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

df = pd.read_csv('filename.csv', parse_dates=True, dtype=Object, delimiter="\t", quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE, encoding='utf-8')

You can also preprocess the data, basically changing all first 7 (0th to 6th, both inclusive) commas to semicolons, and leaving the ones after that as commas* using something like:

to_write = []
counter = 0
with open("sampleCSV.csv", "r") as f:
    for line in f:
        while counter < 7:
            line = list(line)
            line[line.index(",")] = ";"
            counter += 1
        counter = 0
        to_write.append("".join(line))

You can now read this to_write list as a Pandas object like

data = pd.DataFrame(to_write)
data = pd.DataFrame(data[0].str.split(";").values.tolist()),

or write it back into a csv and read using pandas with a semicolon delimiter such as read_csv(csv_path, sep=';').

I kinda drafted this quickly without rigorous testing, but should give you some ideas to try. Please comment if it does or doesn't help, and I'll edit it.

*Another option is to delete all commas after 7th, and keep using the comma separator. Either way the point is to differentiate the first 7 delimiters from the subsequent punctuation.