Question

I have a very simple piece of code that I used in previous versions of Python without issues (version 2.5 and prior). Now with 3.0, the following code give the error on the login line ‘argument 1 must be string or buffer, not str’.

import smtplib     smtpserver = 'mail.somedomain.com'    AUTHREQUIRED = 1                     # if you need to use SMTP AUTH set to 1    smtpuser = '[e-mail]'    # for SMTP AUTH, set SMTP username here    smtppass = 'somepassword'            # for SMTP AUTH, set SMTP password here    msg = 'Some message to send'     RECIPIENTS = ['[e-mail]']    SENDER = '[e-mail]'     session = smtplib.SMTP(smtpserver)     if AUTHREQUIRED:       session.login(smtpuser, smtppass)     smtpresult = session.sendmail(SENDER, RECIPIENTS, msg) 

Google shows there are some issues with that error not being clear, but I still can’t figure out what I need to try to make it work. Suggestions included defining the username as b’username’, but that doesn’t seem to work either.

Answer 1

UPDATE: just noticed from a look at the bug tracker there’s a suggested fix also:

Edit smtplib.py and replace the existing encode_plain() definition with this:

def encode_plain(user, password):     s = '\0%s\0%s' % (user, password)     return encode_base64(s.encode('ascii'), eol='') 

Tested here on my installation and it works properly.