Question

I have the following code that I am using to send a message from a gmail account to another gmail account:

 import smtplib

 class GmailSmpt:

    global server
    server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com','587')
    def __init__(self,sendfrom,sendto,usrname,pswd):
        self.sendfrom = sendfrom
        self.sendto = sendto
        self.usrname = usrname
        self.pswd = pswd
    def connect(self):
        msg = 'this is a test message'
        server.starttls()
        server.login(self.usrname,self.pswd)
        server.sendmail(self.sendfrom,self.sendto,msg)
        print ("your email has been sent")
    def quit(self):
        server.quit()



    first = GmailSmpt('sendfrom','sendto',
    'usrname','pswd')

    first.connect()
    first.quit()

Instead of having a global variable server, I would like to use “return server” in the “connect” function and then pass server on to the “quit” function. How would I put that into the parameter of def quit(self, ?)? What I would normally do in a non object oriented program is “def quit(self,connect), but in this case I want to be able to call def connect() and def quit() separately.

Thanks!

Answer 1

How about make server an attribute of each instance of GmailSmpt:

class GmailSmpt:
    def __init__(self,sendfrom,sendto,usrname,pswd):
        self.server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com','587')
        ...

After all, server.login uses self.usrname, and self.pswd, so server‘s domain of relevance is bound to one instance of GmailSmpt, so it makes sense to make server an attribute of that instance also.

PS. If you make server an attribute of self, then you’ll also have to change server –> self.server in the other methods.