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Sending Email Using Python and smtplib – Quick HowTo

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/gineesh/ https://twitter.com/GiniGangadharan

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What is smtpLib

We can easily send email from python script using smtplib module, which defines an SMTP client session object that can be used to send mail to any Internet machine with an SMTP or ESMTP listener daemon.

Import smtplib module

Letโ€™s create a simple script for the same by importing smtplib module.

import smtplib
from email.MIMEMultipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.MIMEText import MIMEText

Please use different methods if you are using different version of python. Eg: show below.

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

Prepare Email Configurations

You may add this items directly inside the script (hardcoded) or add as a separate configuration file outside.

email_from_addr = "[email protected]"
email_to_addr = "[email protected]"
email_smtp_server = "smtp.gmail.com"
email_smtp_port = "587"
email_user = "myfromemail"
email_password = "mypassword"

#Email Subject
email_subject = "Welcome to Python Email Test"

Prepare Email Body

This is not mandatory to test but adding a better way to handle multipart and rich email content.

# HTML + CSS for body
email_body = None

email_body_header = ' '
email_body_header = email_body_header + '<html><head></head><body>'
email_body_header = email_body_header + '<style type="text/css"></style>'
email_body_header = email_body_header + '<br><p>Hello Team,<br><br>This is a test email.<br>'

email_body_content = ' '
email_body_content = email_body_content + '<H1>This is main content area</h1>'

email_body_footer = ' '
email_body_footer = email_body_footer + '<br>Thank you'
email_body_footer = email_body_footer + '<br>Support Team<br>'

email_body = str(email_body_header) + str(email_body_content) + str(email_body_footer)

Prepare Email Content

Now, we have all details of email and letโ€™s stitch all together.

message = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
message['From'] = email_from_addr
message['To'] = email_to_addr
message['Subject'] = email_subject
body = email_body
message.attach(MIMEText(body, 'html'))

# print (email_body)

Send Email

Now with prepared data, we will create a connection and send email over that.

server = smtplib.SMTP(email_smtp_server,int(email_smtp_port))
text = message.as_string()
server.starttls()
server.login(email_user, email_password)
server.sendmail(email_from_addr,email_to_addr,message.as_string())
server.quit()

Note : If you are using an open smtp connection (with whitelisted IP), you donโ€™t need to do login as authentication will happen automatically (if you configured your SMTP server in such a way).

Check Email Received

Sample email received

You can access the full script from github โ€“ python-email.py.

Refer SMTPLib documentation for more details.

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/gineesh/ https://twitter.com/GiniGangadharan
Gineesh Madapparambath is the founder of techbeatly and he is the co-author of The Kubernetes Bible, Second Edition. and the author of ๐—”๐—ป๐˜€๐—ถ๐—ฏ๐—น๐—ฒ ๐—ณ๐—ผ๐—ฟ ๐—ฅ๐—ฒ๐—ฎ๐—น-๐—Ÿ๐—ถ๐—ณ๐—ฒ ๐—”๐˜‚๐˜๐—ผ๐—บ๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ถ๐—ผ๐—ป. He has worked as a Systems Engineer, Automation Specialist, and content author. His primary focus is on Ansible Automation, Containerisation (OpenShift & Kubernetes), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform). (aka Gini Gangadharan - iamgini.com)

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