How to Send Emails Using Python's smtplib and email Modules
This tutorial explains how to configure an email account, connect to an SMTP server with Python's smtplib, construct plain‑text, HTML, and attachment‑based messages using the email.mime library, and send them programmatically, providing complete code examples for each step.
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.
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