Quick and Dirty Python - Gmailing

One of my friend whose whole world revolves around Python has a saying, “Python is the second best language for everything”.

I haven't heard anything truer. Python second best language for everything. Are there languages faster? Yeah. Are there languages richer in features? True. But no language allows you to go from ideation to a proof of concept nearly as fast as python. And given the way it reads, no other language is more friendly to people who don’t code for a living, thus making for a perfect language for automating the boring stuff away.

Thus I thought to share a few things that I use regularly to automating the boring stuff out of my own workflows.

Are these the best ways to do it? No. I mean, see the title!

Today I would like to show how you can write a script to send a email with your Gmail account, but before we can get to the code, we have some setup to do.

Setup

Create a new gmail account. I would highly recommend not to use one already in use, due to potential security issues. However, should you choose to do so, skip to point 2. Switch on “Allow less secure apps” in this account's security settings. If you are using your own account. I would recommend turn on Two Factor Authentication. Once you do that, you won’t be able to turn on “Allow less secure apps”. Instead you would need to create an App Password, and use that as a password in code. Save that in an environment variable. Let's say QAD_PWD Here's a good guide on how to do that on Windows On a UNIX-type OS, add the following to your .bash_profile or .zprofile file.

export QAD_PWD=your_password

Having done that, you're all set to code!

Show me the code!

First up, you need to import ssl to create a secure context for gmailing, and import smtplib to connect to Gmail's SMTP server.

Note: SMTP stands for Standard Mail Transfer Protocol and underlies all the mailing we take for granted. You can read more about it here.

import ssl
import smtplib

Now we can retrieve our password. I'm going to use os here but you're free to use a package of your liking.

import os
pwd = os.environ['QAD_PWD']

Next, we need to setup a secure ssl context and finally connect with gmail's smtp server.

Note: The port for ssl is 465, and the url to Gmail's SMTP server is smtp.gmail.com

sender_account = "dummy.sender@gmail.com"
secure_context = ssl.create_default_context()
with smtplib.SMTP_SSL("smtp.gmail.com", 465, context= secure_context) as server:
    server.login(sender_account, pwd)
    # todo

That's all well and good, but what about sending email? We'll that's just a matter of adding 1 more line.

server.sendmail(sender_email, "dummy.reciever@gmail.com", "Hey! This mail was sent using python")

And you'll end up with something like this:

import ssl
import smtplib
import os
 
pwd = os.environ['QAD_PWD']
 
sender_account = "dummy.sender@gmail.com"
reciever_account = "dummy.reciever@gmail.com"
msg = "Hey! This mail was sent using python"
secure_context = ssl.create_default_context()
with smtplib.SMTP_SSL("smtp.gmail.com", 465, context= secure_context) as server:
    server.login(sender_account, pwd)
    server.sendmail(sender_account, reciever_account, msg)

And that's it folks. You just sent your first mail using python.

Fun with MIMEMultipart

You're not restricted to sending just some text over email. You can setup Subject and BCCS, send email rich with fancy html and css, or ripe with attachments (within the upload size limit, of course). And MIMEMultipart is your friend in this endeavour.

Here we are going to see how to send a HTML laden email using MIMEMultipart and MIMEText, and as always we start by importing those.

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

We now need to construct our message a bit differently than before.

msg = MIMEMultipart("alternative")

Make note of that “alternative”, we'll come back to that in a bit. But before that, we can now specify From, To, Subject and even BCC in the msg as a number of keys.

msg["Subject"] = "rich email"
msg["From"] = sender_email
msg["To"] = receiver_email
msg["Bcc"] = reciever_email

Remember that “alternative”? That will help MIMEMultipart combine both HTML and Text data into a single message to be sent.

text = """\
Hey!
This mail was sent using python"""
 
html = """\
<html>
  <body>
    <p>Hey!<br>
       This mail was sent using python
    </p>
  </body>
</html>
"""
 
# Turn the text and html into MIMEText so they can be attached to MIMEMultipart message
html_part = MIMEText(text, "plain")
text_part = MIMEText(html, "html")
 
msg.attach(html_part)
msg.attach(text_part)

So you end up with something like this:

import ssl
import smtplib
import os
 
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
 
pwd = os.environ['QAD_PWD']
 
sender_account = "dummy.sender@gmail.com"
reciever_account = "dummy.reciever@gmail.com"
 
msg = MIMEMultipart("alternative")
msg["Subject"] = "rich email"
msg["From"] = sender_email
msg["To"] = receiver_email
msg["Bcc"] = reciever_email
 
text = """\
Hey!
This mail was sent using python"""
 
html = """\
<html>
  <body>
    <p>Hey!<br>
       This mail was sent using python
    </p>
  </body>
</html>
"""
 
# Turn the text and html into MIMEText so they can be attached to MIMEMultipart message
html_part = MIMEText(text, "plain")
text_part = MIMEText(html, "html")
 
msg.attach(html_part)
msg.attach(text_part)
 
 
secure_context = ssl.create_default_context()
with ("smtp.gmail.com", 465, context= secure_context) as server:
    server.login(sender_account, pwd)
    server.sendmail(sender_account, reciever_account, msg.as_string())

There's a lot more that can be done with this as a base. You can attach files through MIMEBase and even include them in your email HTML by giving them a Content-ID, or send personalised emails by employing a CSV or Excel sheet, I leave it up-to you to find out about it. And hopefully the simplicity of this approach inspires you to try your hand at this, or automate away some soul-sucking part of your job.

Really, the world (well, your IDE of choice) is your oyster.

PS: To check out how I used this to create Email reports for Android Unit and UITests running on bitrise, look here.