using the email module

Thu Sep 28 12:47:47 EDT 2006

    THE GOAL: I need to send an email with a simple ASCII text body and an
attached HTML file.

    I have scripts that send basic emails via the smtplib module that don't
have any attachements and that seems to work fine.  I first looked at the
mimetools modules but it says it is depreceated since 2.3, so I started
trying to use the email module.  Here is a script that basically follows the
second example given in section 7.1.13 of the Python Library Reference
(http://docs.python.org/lib/node162.html).  (***Note that there are some
mistakes in that documentation about module names.***)

    When I run this and view the email I receive in MS Outlook Express, what
I see is the HTML rendered in the body of the message, my body is not seen
anywhere and there is no attachment. (Note: I like to bash MS as much as
anyone: the reality is I need to work with this client - save it)

     I have not read the whole spec for RFC 822 and don't profess to
understand it, but that's the point of having modules like email, right? Am
I misunderstanding something about how I am using 'email' here or is this
module not working right? Does this give you an email with an HTML file
attachement on your client? Can someone kindly point out what I've done
wrong or give me a working example?

Thanks!
-ej

    Here's the script (put in your own email and server if you want to run
it), and the text (with some identifying info stripped) of the email I
receive is below that:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import smtplib
from email.MIMEText import MIMEText
from email.MIMEMultipart import MIMEMultipart

# GLOBAL DATA
#=============
MAIL_SERVER  = 'your_server.com'
MAIL_SUBJECT = "Python.SMTP email test"
MAIL_TO      = 'your_addr at example.com'
MAIL_FROM    = "Python.SMTP email test"

# Create a text/plain message

Body = """\
This is intended to be the body of my email. The HTML below should not
be seen directly in the body but should be a separate attachment.
"""

msg = MIMEMultipart()
msg['Subject'] = MAIL_SUBJECT
msg['From']    = MAIL_FROM
msg['To']      = MAIL_TO
msg.preamble   = Body

html = """\
<html>
<head>
  <title>Sample HTML File</title>
</head>

<body>
  <h1>Can you see this?</h1>
  <p>This is a short paragraph.</p>
</body>

</html>
"""
msg.attach(MIMEText(html, 'html'))
# print msg.as_string()

# Send the message via our own SMTP server, but don't include the
# envelope header.
smtp = smtplib.SMTP(MAIL_SERVER)
smtp.sendmail(MAIL_FROM, [MAIL_TO], msg.as_string())
smtp.close()
# end of python script

Here's the text of the email I received:

Return-Path: <Python.SMTP>
Delivered-To: my_addr at example.com
<several Received headers stripped>
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============1669450343=="
MIME-Version: 1.0
Subject: Python.SMTP email test
From: Python.SMTP email test
To: my_addr at example.com

This is intended to be the body of my email. The HTML below should not
be seen directly in the body but should be a separate attachment.
--===============1669450343==
Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

<html>
<head>
  <title>Sample HTML File</title>
</head>

<body>
  <h1>Can you see this?</h1>
  <p>This is a short paragraph.</p>
</body>

</html>

--===============1669450343==--