Sending Email with Python 3

A common task in any popular programming language is the ability to send emails to your users, be it as a password reset or as a contact page submission on a blog just like this one.

The below snippet can be used to accomplish this, just change the variables depending on your use case. It assumes that you have a local SMTP server running on the machine you are running the script on (Postfix for example), however you can also login to another service if you want to send via Gmail or Outlook etc.

  
sender = "[email protected]"
sender_name = "Sender Name"
receiver = "[email protected]"
receiver_name = "Receiver Name"
subject = "This is the subject line"

message_str = "This is the body of the message"

mime = """From: {0} <{1}>
To: {2} <{3}>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain
Subject: {4}
{5}
""".format(sender_name, sender, receiver_name, receiver, subject, message_str)

try:
    smtpObj = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
    smtpObj.sendmail(sender, receiver, mime)
    return "Successfully sent email"
except smtplib.SMTPException:
    return "Error: unable to send email"

You can also add additional properties to the MIME message for extra functionality:

• Reply-To: Name <address> to specify who the receiver should send their replies to
• Change the Content-type to text/html if you want to use HTML within your message body for styling

For more information take a look at the smptlib docs.