Examples — Python 2.7.18 documentation (original) (raw)

18.1.11. email: Examples¶

Here are a few examples of how to use the email package to read, write, and send simple email messages, as well as more complex MIME messages.

First, let’s see how to create and send a simple text message:

Import smtplib for the actual sending function

import smtplib

Import the email modules we'll need

from email.mime.text import MIMEText

Open a plain text file for reading. For this example, assume that

the text file contains only ASCII characters.

fp = open(textfile, 'rb')

Create a text/plain message

msg = MIMEText(fp.read()) fp.close()

me == the sender's email address

you == the recipient's email address

msg['Subject'] = 'The contents of %s' % textfile msg['From'] = me msg['To'] = you

Send the message via our own SMTP server, but don't include the

envelope header.

s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost') s.sendmail(me, [you], msg.as_string()) s.quit()

And parsing RFC822 headers can easily be done by the parse(filename) or parsestr(message_as_string) methods of the Parser() class:

Import the email modules we'll need

from email.parser import Parser

If the e-mail headers are in a file, uncomment this line:

#headers = Parser().parse(open(messagefile, 'r'))

Or for parsing headers in a string, use:

headers = Parser().parsestr('From: user@example.com\n' 'To: someone_else@example.com\n' 'Subject: Test message\n' '\n' 'Body would go here\n')

Now the header items can be accessed as a dictionary:

print 'To: %s' % headers['to'] print 'From: %s' % headers['from'] print 'Subject: %s' % headers['subject']

Here’s an example of how to send a MIME message containing a bunch of family pictures that may be residing in a directory:

Import smtplib for the actual sending function

import smtplib

Here are the email package modules we'll need

from email.mime.image import MIMEImage from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart

COMMASPACE = ', '

Create the container (outer) email message.

msg = MIMEMultipart() msg['Subject'] = 'Our family reunion'

me == the sender's email address

family = the list of all recipients' email addresses

msg['From'] = me msg['To'] = COMMASPACE.join(family) msg.preamble = 'Our family reunion'

Assume we know that the image files are all in PNG format

for file in pngfiles: # Open the files in binary mode. Let the MIMEImage class automatically # guess the specific image type. fp = open(file, 'rb') img = MIMEImage(fp.read()) fp.close() msg.attach(img)

Send the email via our own SMTP server.

s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost') s.sendmail(me, family, msg.as_string()) s.quit()

Here’s an example of how to send the entire contents of a directory as an email message: 1

#!/usr/bin/env python

"""Send the contents of a directory as a MIME message."""

import os import sys import smtplib

For guessing MIME type based on file name extension

import mimetypes

from optparse import OptionParser

from email import encoders from email.message import Message from email.mime.audio import MIMEAudio from email.mime.base import MIMEBase from email.mime.image import MIMEImage from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart from email.mime.text import MIMEText

COMMASPACE = ', '

def main(): parser = OptionParser(usage="""
Send the contents of a directory as a MIME message.

Usage: %prog [options]

Unless the -o option is given, the email is sent by forwarding to your local SMTP server, which then does the normal delivery process. Your local machine must be running an SMTP server. """) parser.add_option('-d', '--directory', type='string', action='store', help="""Mail the contents of the specified directory, otherwise use the current directory. Only the regular files in the directory are sent, and we don't recurse to subdirectories.""") parser.add_option('-o', '--output', type='string', action='store', metavar='FILE', help="""Print the composed message to FILE instead of sending the message to the SMTP server.""") parser.add_option('-s', '--sender', type='string', action='store', metavar='SENDER', help='The value of the From: header (required)') parser.add_option('-r', '--recipient', type='string', action='append', metavar='RECIPIENT', default=[], dest='recipients', help='A To: header value (at least one required)') opts, args = parser.parse_args() if not opts.sender or not opts.recipients: parser.print_help() sys.exit(1) directory = opts.directory if not directory: directory = '.' # Create the enclosing (outer) message outer = MIMEMultipart() outer['Subject'] = 'Contents of directory %s' % os.path.abspath(directory) outer['To'] = COMMASPACE.join(opts.recipients) outer['From'] = opts.sender outer.preamble = 'You will not see this in a MIME-aware mail reader.\n'

for filename in os.listdir(directory):
    path = os.path.join(directory, filename)
    if not os.path.isfile(path):
        continue
    # Guess the content type based on the file's extension.  Encoding
    # will be ignored, although we should check for simple things like
    # gzip'd or compressed files.
    ctype, encoding = mimetypes.guess_type(path)
    if ctype is None or encoding is not None:
        # No guess could be made, or the file is encoded (compressed), so
        # use a generic bag-of-bits type.
        ctype = 'application/octet-stream'
    maintype, subtype = ctype.split('/', 1)
    if maintype == 'text':
        fp = open(path)
        # Note: we should handle calculating the charset
        msg = MIMEText(fp.read(), _subtype=subtype)
        fp.close()
    elif maintype == 'image':
        fp = open(path, 'rb')
        msg = MIMEImage(fp.read(), _subtype=subtype)
        fp.close()
    elif maintype == 'audio':
        fp = open(path, 'rb')
        msg = MIMEAudio(fp.read(), _subtype=subtype)
        fp.close()
    else:
        fp = open(path, 'rb')
        msg = MIMEBase(maintype, subtype)
        msg.set_payload(fp.read())
        fp.close()
        # Encode the payload using Base64
        encoders.encode_base64(msg)
    # Set the filename parameter
    msg.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment', filename=filename)
    outer.attach(msg)
# Now send or store the message
composed = outer.as_string()
if opts.output:
    fp = open(opts.output, 'w')
    fp.write(composed)
    fp.close()
else:
    s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
    s.sendmail(opts.sender, opts.recipients, composed)
    s.quit()

if name == 'main': main()

Here’s an example of how to unpack a MIME message like the one above, into a directory of files:

#!/usr/bin/env python

"""Unpack a MIME message into a directory of files."""

import os import sys import email import errno import mimetypes

from optparse import OptionParser

def main(): parser = OptionParser(usage="""
Unpack a MIME message into a directory of files.

Usage: %prog [options] msgfile """) parser.add_option('-d', '--directory', type='string', action='store', help="""Unpack the MIME message into the named directory, which will be created if it doesn't already exist.""") opts, args = parser.parse_args() if not opts.directory: parser.print_help() sys.exit(1)

try:
    msgfile = args[0]
except IndexError:
    parser.print_help()
    sys.exit(1)

try:
    os.mkdir(opts.directory)
except OSError as e:
    # Ignore directory exists error
    if e.errno != errno.EEXIST:
        raise

fp = open(msgfile)
msg = email.message_from_file(fp)
fp.close()

counter = 1
for part in msg.walk():
    # multipart/* are just containers
    if part.get_content_maintype() == 'multipart':
        continue
    # Applications should really sanitize the given filename so that an
    # email message can't be used to overwrite important files
    filename = part.get_filename()
    if not filename:
        ext = mimetypes.guess_extension(part.get_content_type())
        if not ext:
            # Use a generic bag-of-bits extension
            ext = '.bin'
        filename = 'part-%03d%s' % (counter, ext)
    counter += 1
    fp = open(os.path.join(opts.directory, filename), 'wb')
    fp.write(part.get_payload(decode=True))
    fp.close()

if name == 'main': main()

Here’s an example of how to create an HTML message with an alternative plain text version: 2

#!/usr/bin/env python

import smtplib

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart from email.mime.text import MIMEText

me == my email address

you == recipient's email address

me = "my@email.com" you = "your@email.com"

Create message container - the correct MIME type is multipart/alternative.

msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative') msg['Subject'] = "Link" msg['From'] = me msg['To'] = you

Create the body of the message (a plain-text and an HTML version).

text = "Hi!\nHow are you?\nHere is the link you wanted:\nhttps://www.python.org" html = """\

Hi!
How are you?
Here is the link you wanted.

Record the MIME types of both parts - text/plain and text/html.

part1 = MIMEText(text, 'plain') part2 = MIMEText(html, 'html')

Attach parts into message container.

According to RFC 2046, the last part of a multipart message, in this case

the HTML message, is best and preferred.

msg.attach(part1) msg.attach(part2)

Send the message via local SMTP server.

s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')

sendmail function takes 3 arguments: sender's address, recipient's address

and message to send - here it is sent as one string.

s.sendmail(me, you, msg.as_string()) s.quit()

Footnotes

1

Thanks to Matthew Dixon Cowles for the original inspiration and examples.

2

Contributed by Martin Matejek.