Question

I have looked through many tutorials, as well as other question here on stack overflow, and the documentation and explanation are at minimum, just unexplained code. I would like to send a file that I already have zipped, and send it as an attachment. I have tried copy and pasting the code provided, but its not working, hence I cannot fix the problem.

So what I am asking is if anyone knows who to explain how smtplib as well as email and MIME libraries work together to send a file, more specifically, how to do it with a zip file. Any help would be appreciated.

This is the code that everyone refers to:

import smtplib
import zipfile
import tempfile
from email import encoders
from email.message import Message
from email.mime.base import MIMEBase
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart    

def send_file_zipped(the_file, recipients, sender='[e-mail]'):
    myzip = zipfile.ZipFile('file.zip', 'w')

    # Create the message
    themsg = MIMEMultipart()
    themsg['Subject'] = 'File %s' % the_file
    themsg['To'] = ', '.join(recipients)
    themsg['From'] = sender
    themsg.preamble = 'I am not using a MIME-aware mail reader.\n'
    msg = MIMEBase('application', 'zip')
    msg.set_payload(zf.read())
    encoders.encode_base64(msg)
    msg.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment', 
               filename=the_file + '.zip')
    themsg.attach(msg)
    themsg = themsg.as_string()

    # send the message
    smtp = smtplib.SMTP()
    smtp.connect()
    smtp.sendmail(sender, recipients, themsg)
    smtp.close()

I suspect the issue is this code zips a file as well. I don’t want to zip anything as I already have a zipped file I would like to send. In either case, this code is poorly documented as well as the python libraries themselves as they provide no insight on anything past img file and text files.

UPDATE: Error I am getting now. I have also updated what is in my file with the code above

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Users/Zeroe/Documents/python_hw/cgi-bin/zip_it.py", line 100, in <module>
send_file_zipped('hw5.zip', '[e-mail]')
File "/Users/Zeroe/Documents/python_hw/cgi-bin/zip_it.py", line 32, in send_file_zipped
msg.set_payload(myzip.read())
TypeError: read() takes at least 2 arguments (1 given)

Answer 1

I don’t really see the problem. Just omit the part which creates the zip file and, instead, just load the zip file you have.

Essentially, this part here

msg = MIMEBase('application', 'zip')
msg.set_payload(zf.read())
encoders.encode_base64(msg)
msg.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment', 
               filename=the_file + '.zip')
themsg.attach(msg)

creates the attachment. The

msg.set_payload(zf.read())

sets, well, the payload of the attachment to what you read from the file zf (probably meaning zip file).

Just open your zip file beforehand and let this line read from it.