Simplify Python Email Sending with Zmail: A Complete Guide

Sending email is simple but many pitfalls exist; the Zmail project aims to make sending email with Python as easy as possible.

Drawbacks of other libraries

Server rejection due to improper headers (From, To, etc.)

Complex construction, especially when adding attachments

Sending hassles: you must locate the SMTP server, port, and whether SSL/TLS is required

Parsing emails is tricky: handling bytes, boundaries, and various encodings

Too many external dependencies can cause version conflicts

Advantages of Zmail

Automatically fills most headers that cause server rejections

Constructs an email by mapping a simple dictionary

Auto‑detects SMTP server address and port, selecting the appropriate protocol

Depends only on Python 3, making it easy to embed in other projects

Typical use cases

Monitoring scripts that need to send/receive emails

Embedding email functionality into existing applications

Custom email workflows such as scheduled or timed delivery

Installation

$ pip3 install zmail

Zmail supports only Python 3; ensure your email account has SMTP enabled, and some providers (e.g., 163.com, Gmail) may require an additional SMTP password.

Sending an email

import zmail
mail_content = {
    'subject': 'Success!',
    'content': 'This message from zmail!'
}
server = zmail.server('[email protected]', 'your_password')
server.send_mail('[email protected]', mail_content)

To add attachments, include an 'attachments' key with the file path in the dictionary.

Receiving emails

import zmail
server = zmail.server('[email protected]', 'yourpassword')
mail = server.get_latest()
zmail.show(mail)

Additional methods such as get_mail(id), get_mails(subject=..., after=..., sender=...), get_info(), and stat() provide access to mail details, headers, and mailbox statistics.

Email structure

content-type

subject

to

from

date

boundary

content

contents

attachments

id

Getting attachments

zmail.get_attachment(mail)
zmail.get_attachment(mail, 'example.zip')

Supported email providers

If your provider is not listed, submit an issue on the GitHub repository.