Send mail with attachment from your Gmail account using Python (original) (raw)

Last Updated : 22 Oct, 2017

In last article, we have discussed the basics of sending a mail from a Gmail account without any subject as well as without any attachment. Today, we will learn how to send mail with attachment and subject using Python. Before moving on, it is highly recommended to learn how to send a simple mail using Python and learn the basics working of ‘smtplib’ library of Python.
If you have read the previous article, you have gained the knowledge how a session is created and how it works. Now, you need to learn to attach a file and subject to the mail. For that you need to import some native libraries of Python. From these libraries, you need to import the tools used in our programs.

Steps to send mail with Attachments from Gmail account:

  1. For adding an attachment, you need to import:
    • import smtplib
    • from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
    • from email.mime.text import MIMEText
    • from email.mime.base import MIMEBase
    • from email import encoders
      These are some libraries which will make our work simple. These are the native libraries and you dont need to import any external library for this.
  2. Firstly, create an instance of MIMEMultipart, namely “msg” to begin with.
  3. Mention the sender’s email id, receiver’s email id and the subject in the “From”, “To” and “Subject” key of the created instance “msg”.
  4. In a string, write the body of the message you want to send, namely body. Now, attach the body with the instance msg using attach function.
  5. Open the file you wish to attach in the “rb” mode. Then create an instance of MIMEBase with two parameters. First one is ‘_maintype’ amd the other one is ‘_subtype’. This is the base class for all the MIME-specific sub-classes of Message.
    Note that ‘_maintype’ is the Content-Type major type (e.g. text or image), and ‘_subtype’ is the Content-Type minor type (e.g. plain or gif or other media).
  6. set_payload is used to change the payload the encoded form. Encode it in encode_base64. And finally attach the file with the MIMEMultipart created instance msg.

After finishing up these steps, follow the instructions described in the previous article to create a session, secure it and check the authenticity and then after sending the mail, terminate the session.

import smtplib

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart

from email.mime.text import MIMEText

from email.mime.base import MIMEBase

from email import encoders

fromaddr = "EMAIL address of the sender"

toaddr = "EMAIL address of the receiver"

msg = MIMEMultipart()

msg[ 'From' ] = fromaddr

msg[ 'To' ] = toaddr

msg[ 'Subject' ] = "Subject of the Mail"

body = "Body_of_the_mail"

msg.attach(MIMEText(body, 'plain' ))

filename = "File_name_with_extension"

attachment = open ( "Path of the file" , "rb" )

p = MIMEBase( 'application' , 'octet-stream' )

p.set_payload((attachment).read())

encoders.encode_base64(p)

p.add_header( 'Content-Disposition' , "attachment; filename= %s" % filename)

msg.attach(p)

s = smtplib.SMTP( 'smtp.gmail.com' , 587 )

s.starttls()

s.login(fromaddr, "Password_of_the_sender" )

text = msg.as_string()

s.sendmail(fromaddr, toaddr, text)

s.quit()

Important Points:

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