Automate Book List Emails with Python: Web Scraping & Scheduled Sending

Introduction

The author shares a small project that combines a Python web‑scraper with automated email delivery. The goal is to fetch a book list from a website, format the information, and send it to a specified mailbox at regular intervals.

Idea

The approach consists of three steps: create a spider to crawl the target site, generate the email content, and set up a timed task that triggers the sending process.

Implementation

The complete code is provided below. Replace the three placeholders marked in red in the original screenshots: the sender's QQ email address, the QQ email authorization code, and the recipient's email address.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import requests, bs4
import smtplib
import schedule
import time
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.header import Header

# Configuration (replace with your own credentials)
account = '{0}'.format('[email protected]')
password = '{0}'.format('awmowqginzdijg')
receiver = '{0}'.format('[email protected]')

# Spider: fetch book titles and authors from sobooks.cc
def recipe_spider():
    list_all = ''
    num = 0
    for a in range(1, 3):
        url = f'https://sobooks.cc/page/{a}'
        res = requests.get(url)
        res.encoding = res.apparent_encoding
        bs = BeautifulSoup(res.text, 'html.parser')
        books = bs.find_all('h3')
        authors = bs.find_all('p')
        for i in range(len(books)):
            num += 1
            book = books[i].text.strip()
            author = authors[i+1].text.strip()
            entry = f'书名{num}: {book}，作者: {author}
'
            list_all += entry
    return list_all

# Send email with the fetched content
def send_email(list_all):
    mailhost = 'smtp.qq.com'
    qqmail = smtplib.SMTP()
    qqmail.connect(mailhost, 25)
    qqmail.login(account, password)
    content = '亲爱的，今天书单' + list_all
    message = MIMEText(content, 'plain', 'utf-8')
    subject = '今天看什么'
    message['Subject'] = Header(subject, 'utf-8')
    try:
        qqmail.sendmail(account, receiver, message.as_string())
        print('邮件发送成功')
    except Exception:
        print('邮件发送失败')
    qqmail.quit()

# Job executed by the scheduler
def job():
    print('开始一次任务')
    list_all = recipe_spider()
    send_email(list_all)
    print('任务完成')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    # Run the job every 0.05 minutes (3 seconds) for demonstration
    schedule.every(0.05).minutes.do(job)
    while True:
        schedule.run_pending()
        time.sleep(1)

Common Issues

Typical problems include incorrect email address formatting or an invalid authorization code, which cause the SMTP login to fail. Verify that the email suffix is correct and that the authorization code is copied completely.

To obtain a QQ email authorization code, open QQ Mail, go to Settings → Account, scroll to the bottom, click “Generate Authorization Code”, and copy the displayed string into the script.

Conclusion

The article demonstrates how to combine web scraping, email composition, and scheduled execution in Python to create an automated book‑list notification system. Readers are encouraged to try the code, adjust the credentials, and explore further enhancements.