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

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is a protocol for sending emails; Python's smtplib provides a convenient wrapper.

First, obtain an email account and its authorization code (e.g., QQ mail). Then connect to the SMTP server using

import smtplib
con = smtplib.SMTP_SSL('smtp.163.com', 465)

and log in with con.login('[email protected]', 'auth_code').

Construct the email using the email.mime package: create a MIMEMultipart() object, set the subject with Header, specify the sender and recipients, and attach content. For plain‑text messages, attach a MIMEText(content, 'plain', 'utf-8') object; for HTML messages, attach a MIMEText(html_content, 'html', 'utf-8') object.

Send the message with con.sendmail(sender, recipients, msg.as_string()) and close the connection with con.quit().

To add attachments, create a MIMEText (or MIMEImage) object with the file data encoded as base64, set its Content‑Disposition to attachment; filename="file.ext", attach it to the message, and then send as above.