Question

I developed an email system for my client by using email.mime library. I works very well for some mail clients. For example on gmail I can see html body and attachment file but on yahoo I get an empty email. Here is the code:

import smtplib
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.mime.base import MIMEBase
import email.charset

from email import Encoders
def buildEmail(from_email, to_email, subject, text_msg, html_msg, attach_pdf_file):
    """
    This function build a body for text/html message and if attachment file provide
    then it will attach it too with email.
    """

    # Create message container - the correct MIME type is multipart/alternative.

    msgRoot = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
    msgRoot['Subject'] = subject

    msgRoot.preamble = 'This is a multi-part message in MIME format.'
    msgRoot.epilogue = ''


    # Record the MIME types of both parts - text/plain and text/html.
    text_part = MIMEText(text_msg, 'plain')
    msgRoot.attach(text_part)

    if html_msg is not None and html_msg != '':
        html_part = MIMEText(html_msg, 'html')
        msgRoot.attach(html_part)


    # Attach a file if provided
    if attach_file is not None and attach_file != '':
        fp = open(attach_pdf_file, 'rb')
        part = MIMEBase('application', 'pdf')
        part.set_payload( fp.read() )
        Encoders.encode_base64(part)
        part.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment', filename="%s"%          os.path.basename(attach_pdf_file))
        msgRoot.attach(part)
        fp.close()


    s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
    s.sendmail(from_email, to_email, msgRoot.as_string())
    s.quit()

Any idea where am I making a mistake?

Answer 1

I see several problems with this code that should prevent it from working at all on Python 2.x.

1) You don’t define attach_file anywhere, so this line raises an exception:

if attach_file is not None and attach_file != '':

Did you mean attach_pdf_file? Changing attach_file to attach_pdf_file corrects that exception.

2) Maybe you just left it out of your code sample, but you call a function from os.path, but you never import os anywhere in your script. Adding that corrects that exception.

Once those problems are corrected, running the script on my system with the from address as a gmail address raises this exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/ra/Desktop/stack-overflow.py", line 50, in <module>
    "output.pdf")
  File "/home/ra/Desktop/stack-overflow.py", line 44, in buildEmail
    s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/smtplib.py", line 249, in __init__
    (code, msg) = self.connect(host, port)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/smtplib.py", line 309, in connect
    self.sock = self._get_socket(host, port, self.timeout)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/smtplib.py", line 284, in _get_socket
    return socket.create_connection((port, host), timeout)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/socket.py", line 571, in create_connection
    raise err
error: [Errno 111] Connection refused

I don’t have an SMTP server configured locally on this machine, which explains why I get the error I do. In your case, if the email is sending properly, but only for some email providers, it could be because an email provider realises that even though the address is Yahoo, the SMTP server isn’t and thus refuses the email. It’s just a hunch, but it might explain it (if this weren’t the case, it would be even easier for anyone to send an email “from” any address).