Sending mail from Python using SMTP
The script I use is quite similar; I post it here as an example of how to use the email.* modules to generate MIME messages; so this script can be easily modified to attach pictures, etc.
I rely on my ISP to add the date time header.
My ISP requires me to use a secure smtp connection to send mail, I rely on the smtplib module (downloadable at http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~db2501/ssmtplib.py)
As in your script, the username and password, (given dummy values below), used to authenticate on the SMTP server, are in plain text in the source. This is a security weakness; but the best alternative depends on how careful you need (want?) to be about protecting these.
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#! /usr/local/bin/pythonSMTPserver = 'smtp.att.yahoo.com'sender = 'me@my_email_domain.net'destination = ['recipient@her_email_domain.com']USERNAME = "USER_NAME_FOR_INTERNET_SERVICE_PROVIDER"PASSWORD = "PASSWORD_INTERNET_SERVICE_PROVIDER"# typical values for text_subtype are plain, html, xmltext_subtype = 'plain'content="""\Test message"""subject="Sent from Python"import sysimport osimport refrom smtplib import SMTP_SSL as SMTP # this invokes the secure SMTP protocol (port 465, uses SSL)# from smtplib import SMTP # use this for standard SMTP protocol (port 25, no encryption)# old version# from email.MIMEText import MIMETextfrom email.mime.text import MIMETexttry: msg = MIMEText(content, text_subtype) msg['Subject']= subject msg['From'] = sender # some SMTP servers will do this automatically, not all conn = SMTP(SMTPserver) conn.set_debuglevel(False) conn.login(USERNAME, PASSWORD) try: conn.sendmail(sender, destination, msg.as_string()) finally: conn.quit()except: sys.exit( "mail failed; %s" % "CUSTOM_ERROR" ) # give an error message
The method I commonly use...not much different but a little bit
import smtplibfrom email.MIMEMultipart import MIMEMultipartfrom email.MIMEText import MIMETextmsg = MIMEMultipart()msg['From'] = 'me@gmail.com'msg['To'] = 'you@gmail.com'msg['Subject'] = 'simple email in python'message = 'here is the email'msg.attach(MIMEText(message))mailserver = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com',587)# identify ourselves to smtp gmail clientmailserver.ehlo()# secure our email with tls encryptionmailserver.starttls()# re-identify ourselves as an encrypted connectionmailserver.ehlo()mailserver.login('me@gmail.com', 'mypassword')mailserver.sendmail('me@gmail.com','you@gmail.com',msg.as_string())mailserver.quit()That's it