Electronic mail is a popular communication
medium to send text, images, videos and files to hundreds and thousands of people around
the world. And as pythoneers ourselves, we may come across the question,
can we send emails using python ?. So in this video, I am going to show exactly how you can programmatically send emails in
python. If you are into python like me, you can join our community “All about
python” by subscribing on YouTube, following on Instagram or joining our newsletter
through our blog site allaboutpython.tech. So without any further ado, let’s begin. The task of sending mails in python
can be achieved using a few libraries, if you want to send a simple text mail,
without any HTML content or image, you can just use the smtplib package. But if you
want to send mails with HTML content or images, you can use the email package along with smtplib. For this demo, we will use both smtplib and email package to send mail. We will discuss two
scripts, html mail.py and text mail.py, each having code using and without
using email package respectively. For all the viewers following this tutorial
for learning, I would recommend using an outlook account to send mail rather than
a gmail account because of two reasons: Unlike gmail accounts, you don’t need to
specify a phone number to create the account. With the updated gmail settings, it's much more
difficult to send mail from a gmail account, compared to sending mail from an outlook account. I have already created a sample outlook
account that will send mail to the allaboutpython channel’s official
mail ID using the python script. With the setup instructions clear,
let’s start writing some code. I have my vscode editor opened here and i will start by creating a file
and naming it “text_mail.py”. Within the file, I will first
import all the required modules. We will import getpass to get the outlook
account password from the user using the console. We will import smtplib to send
email through the mail server. Next we will create a few variables. Create a variable named HOST with value
“smtp-mail.outlook.com”. This is the SMTP server domain name of outlook. If you are
using another provider like gmail or yahoo, then you would need to change this value.
You can view the list of providers and their associated smtp server domain name.
Create a variable named PORT with value 587. This the port at which we will connect to the SMTP
server. Most of the serves use port 587 for smtp, but you can view in this list which
providers use the alternate 465 port. Create a variable named FROM_EMAIL with value
“allaboutpythontestacc2@outlook.com”. This the test email account I am using to send
the mail. You can change this value with the email ID of the account you are using.
Create a variable named TO_EMAIL with value “allaboutpythoninfo@gmail.com”. This is the
allaboutpython channel’s official email ID. We will send our test email onto this ID. You can
change this email id to send mail to another ID. Create a variable named password and get its
value from getpass.getpass() function. Within this function, we will pass a string value.
The function will print the prompt message that we have passed here and will take password from
user. The password will not be visible on console, but will be entered and understood by the
program, and saved inside the password variable. Create a variable named message which will
contain the message we need to send through the mail. Now there’s a specific format
you need to set to send the message. The first line of the message should start with
Subject: followed by the subject of the mail you want to set. From the next line, you can
write the body of the message in plain text. With all the variables created,
let’s start connection to the server. We will create a variable named smtp which will
store an object of smtplib.SMTP class. The class will take two required parameters, the host and
the port, which we have already created above. Next we will call the ehlo method of smtp
object. This function will ping the server and check if the server is up and running
or not. This function will return a tuple containing the status code of response and
the response message received from server. We will also add a print statement
just to view how the response looks. Next we will call the smtp.starttls function. This
function will establish tls connection between our system and the server. This is especially
important to perform if you want to send your mails securely over the internet. This function
will also return a tuple containing the status code and the response message. We will again
add a print statement just to view the response. Next we will login to server using
our account’s email ID and password. We will call the smtp.login() function
and pass the email ID and password here. Just like the previous functions, this function
will also return a tuple containing a status code and a response message. We will again
add a print statement to view the response. After successful login, we can send
our mail using smtp.sendmail function, The function will take in two parameters
from email, to email and the message. Finally, to close the connection with the
server, we will call the smtp.quit() function. Now let’s the run the script and see how it works. As you can see, the script first asked me
for the password, which i entered here. Next it echoed the server and displayed
its information. Next it displayed the information on starting tls connection.
And finally it displayed the information on logging on the server. You can add more print
statements to view more information if you like. Now if I open allaboutpython gmail
account, you can see that we have received a mail from our test account. On
opening the mail, we can see the subject we wrote here and the message we wrote here.
This is how you can send a simple text mal. For the next step, we will create a script capable of sending html content
on mail using the email package. We will start by creating a new python
file and naming it html_mail.py. We will also create a mail.html file which
will store the html mail we want to send. For this we will use a simple html file with
all the necessary tags like html, head, body etc. and we will add two paragraph tags and
write a simple message here. If you want, you can add more content and css
here to make it more attractive. Within the html_mail.py file, we wil start
by importing the packages. The getpass and smtplib package will remain the same, but we
will also import two modules in email package, namely MIMEMultipart and MIMEText.
MIMEMultipart is used to create the email message object and MIMEText is
used to add html content onto the mail. Just like the previous script, we will
create few variables like host, port, from_email, to_email and password. You can
change these values according to your needs. Next we will create a variable by the name
message which will contain the object of class MIMEMultipart. We will pass in a
string parameter with value ‘alterative’, which refers to mime type mime/alternative. Within the message object, we will set some data
regarding the mail like subject, from, to, cc, bcc etc. For this, we will treat this object like
a dictionary, and add key value pairs to it. Here i have specified the subject of the mail,
the from email address, the to email address, the email addresses to be added in cc and
finally the email addresses to be added in bcc. Next we have written a block of code to
just read the html content that we have saved inside mail.html file. We will
save the content within html variable. Next we will create new variable html_part and
store the object of class MIMEText in it. MIMEText class is used to convert paintext content onto
the correct format based on the mime type passed onto it. In this case, we are passing the html
content here and specifying the mime type as html. Once the html part is ready, we will
simply attach the html content onto the message by writing message.attach html_part. The rest of the code remains similar to the one
we had written in the previous python script. We create an smtp class object, echo the server,
start tls connection, login using account details, send the mail and then quit. The one thing
that has changed is in the send mail code. In this line, we previously just passed
the message in plain text. But since we are using the MIMEMultipart class object,
we will call the as_string function to get a plain text string format of the mail,
which we will pass to the send mail function. Let’s save and run this
script to see how it works. As you can see, we got a console
message similar to the previous one, but if we check the email content, we
can see that the message now has the html content which we write
within the mail.html file. With this, we end today’s
tutorial, hope you liked it. If you did, don’t forget to
subscribe to this channel and check out some of the other videos of
this channel on other useful topics. If you are more of a reader type,
you can also check out our blog site, we have created a blog on the same topic,
along with blogs on other interesting topic. With this, its time for me to go, this
is Vishesh Dvivedi signing off.
