Question

My Django app needs to send emails in HTML format. As per the official documention:

It can be useful to include multiple versions of the content in an
email; the classic example is to send both text and HTML versions of a
message. With Django’s email library, you can do this using the
EmailMultiAlternatives class. This subclass of EmailMessage has an
attach_alternative() method for including extra versions of the
message body in the email. All the other methods (including the class
initialization) are inherited directly from EmailMessage.

…I came up with the following code:

from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
msg = EmailMultiAlternatives()
msg.sender = "[e-mail]"
msg.subject = subject
msg.to = [target,]
msg.attach_alternative(content, "text/html")
msg.send()

This work as expected. However, in some situations I need to include PDF attachments, for which I added the following code just before msg.send():

if attachments is not None:
    for attachment in attachments:
        content = open(attachment.path, 'rb')
        msg.attach(attachment.name,content.read(),'application/pdf')

Although this works – all PDF documents are properly attached to the email – the unwanted side effect is that the HTML content of the email now has disappeared and I’m left with an empty email body with PDF documents attached to it.

What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

The EmailMultiAlternatives is to be used, if you want to provide both plain text and text/html version. Than its up to the email client of the recipient to decide which version to display. What you need is simply:

from django.core import mail

....

msg = mail.EmailMessage(subject, content,
                        to=[target], from_email='[e-mail]')
if attachments is not None:
    for attachment in attachments:
        msg.attach_file(attachment, 'application/zip')