Build a Daily Article Email Bot with Python Web Scraping

Preface

In a Python community a member shared an interesting script that fetches a daily article and emails it, which the author decided to reproduce and explain.

Implementation Idea

The solution consists of two parts: a Python web‑scraper that extracts the article from a web page and stores it in a variable, and an email‑sending routine that builds a MIME message and delivers it through an SMTP server.

Implementation Process

Below is the complete source code.

import requests
from lxml import etree
import time
import smtplib
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.header import Header

account = '{0}'.format('请输入你的邮箱：')
password = '{0}'.format('请输入你的密码：')
receiver = '{0}'.format('请输入收件人的邮箱：')

def getArticle(url):
    global data
    headers = {
        'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.122 Safari/537.36'
    }
    r = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
    html = etree.HTML(r.text)
    article = html.xpath('//h1/text() | //p[@class="article_author"]/span/text() | //div[@class="article_text"]/p/text()')
    data = "%s  %s  %s  %s  %s  %s  %s  %s" % (
        str(time.ctime()),
        '

《', str(article[0]), '

作者：', str(article[1]), '

', '
'.join(article[2:])
    )
    with open('article.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:
        f.write(time.ctime() + '

《' + article[0] + '

作者：' + article[1] + '

')
        f.write('
'.join(article[2:]))
        f.write('

')
    print(data)
    return data

def send_email(data):
    global account, password, receiver
    mailhost = 'smtp.qq.com'
    qqmail = smtplib.SMTP_SSL(mailhost, 465)
    qqmail.login(account, password)
    content = '亲爱的，每日一文：' + data
    message = MIMEText(content, 'plain', 'utf-8')
    subject = '每日一文'
    message['Subject'] = Header(subject, 'utf-8')
    try:
        qqmail.sendmail(account, receiver, message.as_string())
        print('邮件发送成功')
    except:
        print('邮件发送失败')
    qqmail.quit()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    url = 'https://meiriyiwen.com'
    data = getArticle(url)
    send_email(data)

Running the script sends the fetched article to the specified recipient; the result looks like the screenshot below.

You can also schedule the script with a task‑scheduler to receive daily reminders, turning the simple bot into a personal knowledge‑accumulation tool.

Conclusion

The article demonstrates a practical Python project that combines web scraping with automated email delivery, providing a reusable template for daily content sharing and personal automation.