How do I send attachments using SMTP?
I want to write a program that sends email using Python's smtplib. I searched through the document and the RFCs, but couldn't find anything related to attachments. Thus, I'm sure there's some higher-level concept I'm missing out on. Can someone clue me in on how attachments work in SMTP?
Here is an example of a message with a PDF attachment, a text "body" and sending via Gmail.
# Import smtplib for the actual sending function
import smtplib
# For guessing MIME type
import mimetypes
# Import the email modules we'll need
import email
import email.mime.application
# Create a text/plain message
msg = email.mime.Multipart.MIMEMultipart()
msg['Subject'] = 'Greetings'
msg['From'] = '[email protected]'
msg['To'] = '[email protected]'
# The main body is just another attachment
body = email.mime.Text.MIMEText("""Hello, how are you? I am fine.
This is a rather nice letter, don't you think?""")
msg.attach(body)
# PDF attachment
filename='simple-table.pdf'
fp=open(filename,'rb')
att = email.mime.application.MIMEApplication(fp.read(),_subtype="pdf")
fp.close()
att.add_header('Content-Disposition','attachment',filename=filename)
msg.attach(att)
# send via Gmail server
# NOTE: my ISP, Centurylink, seems to be automatically rewriting
# port 25 packets to be port 587 and it is trashing port 587 packets.
# So, I use the default port 25, but I authenticate.
s = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com')
s.starttls()
s.login('[email protected]','xyzpassword')
s.sendmail('[email protected]',['[email protected]'], msg.as_string())
s.quit()
Here's an example I snipped out of a work application we did. It creates an HTML email with an Excel attachment.
import smtplib,email,email.encoders,email.mime.text,email.mime.base
smtpserver = 'localhost'
to = ['[email protected]']
fromAddr = '[email protected]'
subject = "my subject"
# create html email
html = '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" '
html +='"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">'
html +='<body style="font-size:12px;font-family:Verdana"><p>...</p>'
html += "</body></html>"
emailMsg = email.MIMEMultipart.MIMEMultipart('alternative')
emailMsg['Subject'] = subject
emailMsg['From'] = fromAddr
emailMsg['To'] = ', '.join(to)
emailMsg['Cc'] = ", ".join(cc)
emailMsg.attach(email.mime.text.MIMEText(html,'html'))
# now attach the file
fileMsg = email.mime.base.MIMEBase('application','vnd.ms-excel')
fileMsg.set_payload(file('exelFile.xls').read())
email.encoders.encode_base64(fileMsg)
fileMsg.add_header('Content-Disposition','attachment;filename=anExcelFile.xls')
emailMsg.attach(fileMsg)
# send email
server = smtplib.SMTP(smtpserver)
server.sendmail(fromAddr,to,emailMsg.as_string())
server.quit()
What you want to check out is the email module. It lets you build MIME-compliant messages that you then send with smtplib.
Well, attachments are not treated in any special ways, they are "just" leaves of the Message-object tree. You can find the answers to any questions regarding MIME-compliant mesasges in this section of the documentation on the email python package.
In general, any kind of attachment (read: raw binary data) can be represented by using base64
(or similar) Content-Transfer-Encoding.