How to Send Emails Using Python's smtplib and email Modules

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is a protocol for sending email from a source address to a destination address. Python's smtplib library provides a convenient wrapper for SMTP.

1. Prepare the email account

Obtain the email address and its authorization code (example shown for QQ mail). The steps include logging into the webmail, navigating to the help center, and retrieving the authorization code.

2. Basic steps to send an email

The workflow mirrors manual email sending: log in, prepare content, and send.

2.1 Log in to the mailbox

import smtplib
# 1. Connect to the mail server
connection = smtplib.SMTP_SSL('smtp.163.com', 465)
# 2. Log in
connection.login('[email protected]', 'authorization_code')

2.2 Prepare the message data

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.header import Header

msg = MIMEMultipart()
subject = Header('Email Subject', 'utf-8').encode()
msg['Subject'] = subject
msg['From'] = 'Your Name <[email protected]>'
msg['To'] = '[email protected];[email protected]'

text = MIMEText('Email body text', 'plain', 'utf-8')
msg.attach(text)

2.3 Send the email

connection.sendmail('[email protected]', '[email protected]', msg.as_string())
connection.quit()

3. Example email types

3.1 Plain‑text email

import smtplib
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.header import Header

con = smtplib.SMTP_SSL('smtp.163.com', 465)
con.login('[email protected]', 'password')
msg = MIMEMultipart()
subject = Header('Password Recovery', 'utf-8').encode()
msg['Subject'] = subject
msg['From'] = '[email protected] <[email protected]>'
msg['To'] = '[email protected]'
text = MIMEText('Forgot password, need to recover', 'plain', 'utf-8')
msg.attach(text)
con.sendmail('[email protected]', '[email protected]', msg.as_string())
con.quit()

3.2 HTML email

from email.mime.text import MIMEText
html_content = """<h2>Title</h2><p>Paragraph 1</p><p>Paragraph 2</p><img src='https://www.baidu.com/img/bd_logo1.png'> <center>Baidu Image</center><a href='https://www.baidu.com'>Visit Baidu</a>"""
html = MIMEText(html_content, 'html', 'utf-8')
msg.attach(html)

3.3 Email with attachments

from email.mime.text import MIMEText
file_obj = MIMEText(open('files/test.txt', 'rb').read(), 'base64', 'utf-8')
file_obj["Content-Disposition"] = 'attachment; filename="test.txt"'
msg.attach(file_obj)
# repeat for other files
con.sendmail('[email protected]', '[email protected]', msg.as_string())
con.quit()