You would like to send an e-mail message from your Google e-mail account to another account. You also need to attach a file with this message.
To run this recipe, you should have an e-mail account with Google or any other service provider.
We can create an e-mail message and attach Python's python-logo.gif file with the e-mail message. Then, this message is sent from a Google account to a different account.
Listing 4.6 shows us how to send an e-mail from your Google account:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# Python Network Programming Cookbook -- Chapter - 5
# This program is optimized for Python 2.7.
# It may run on any other version with/without modifications.
import argparse
import os
import getpass
import re
import sys
import smtplib
from email.mime.image import MIMEImage
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
SMTP_SERVER = 'smtp.gmail.com'
SMTP_PORT = 587
def send_email(sender, recipient):
""" Send email message """
msg = MIMEMultipart()
msg['Subject'] = 'Python Email Test'
msg['To'] = recipient
msg['From'] = sender
subject = 'Python email Test'
message = 'Images attached.'
# attach image files
files = os.listdir(os.getcwd())
gifsearch = re.compile(".gif", re.IGNORECASE)
files = filter(gifsearch.search, files)
for filename in files:
path = os.path.join(os.getcwd(), filename)
if not os.path.isfile(path):
continue
img = MIMEImage(open(path, 'rb').read(), _subtype="gif")
img.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment', filename=filename)
msg.attach(img)
part = MIMEText('text', "plain")
part.set_payload(message)
msg.attach(part)
# create smtp session
session = smtplib.SMTP(SMTP_SERVER, SMTP_PORT)
session.ehlo()
session.starttls()
session.ehlo
password = getpass.getpass(prompt="Enter you Google password: ")
session.login(sender, password)
session.sendmail(sender, recipient, msg.as_string())
print "Email sent."
session.quit()
if __name__ == '__main__':
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Email Sending Example')
parser.add_argument('--sender', action="store", dest="sender")
parser.add_argument('--recipient', action="store", dest="recipient")
given_args = parser.parse_args()
send_email(given_args.sender, given_args.recipient)Running the following script outputs the success of sending an e-mail to any e-mail address if you provide your Google account details correctly. After running this script, you can check your recipient e-mail account to verify that the e-mail is actually sent.
$ python 5_6_send_email_from_gmail.py --sender=<USERNAME>@gmail.com –recipient=<USER>@<ANOTHER_COMPANY.com> Enter you Google password: Email sent.
In this recipe, an e-mail message is created in the send_email() function. This function is supplied with a Google account from where the e-mail message will be sent. The message header object, msg, is created by calling the MIMEMultipart() class and then subject, recipient, and sender information is added on it.
Python's regular expression-handling module is used to filter the .gif image on the current path. The image attachment object, img, is then created with the MIMEImage() method from the email.mime.image module. A correct image header is added to this object and finally, the image is attached with the msg object created earlier. We can attach multiple image files within a for loop as shown in this recipe. We can also attach a plain text attachment in a similar way.
To send the e-mail message, we create an SMTP session. We call some testing method on this session object, such as ehlo() or starttls(). Then, log in to the Google SMTP server with a username and password and a sendmail() method is called to send the e-mail.