Title: Send HTML Mail From Python
Submitter: Art Gillespie (other recipes)
Last Updated: 2001/08/21
Version no: 1.0
Category:

Description:

After wrestling and wrestling with Outlook 2000 to turn *off* HTML mail, I had to figure out how to send HTML from Python for a recent project. Oh the irony, the irony.

It's good policy (and trivially easy) to embed two versions of your message if you're planning on sending HTML mail: the HTML version, and a text-only version. Lots of folks still prefer their character-mode MUAs (viva Mutt!) so don't go alienating them by sending them something that they can't read.

The e-mails generated by this code have been tested on and render correctly with Outlook 2000, Eudora 4.2, Hotmail, and Netscape Mail. It's likely that they will work in other HTML-capable MUAs as well.

Source: Text Source

def createhtmlmail (html, text, subject):
      	"""Create a mime-message that will render HTML in popular
	   MUAs, text in better ones"""
	import MimeWriter
	import mimetools
	import cStringIO
	
	out = cStringIO.StringIO() # output buffer for our message 
	htmlin = cStringIO.StringIO(html)
 	txtin = cStringIO.StringIO(text)
	
	writer = MimeWriter.MimeWriter(out)
	#
	# set up some basic headers... we put subject here
	# because smtplib.sendmail expects it to be in the
	# message body
	#
	writer.addheader("Subject", subject)
	writer.addheader("MIME-Version", "1.0")
	#
	# start the multipart section of the message
	# multipart/alternative seems to work better
	# on some MUAs than multipart/mixed
	#
	writer.startmultipartbody("alternative")
	writer.flushheaders()
	#
	# the plain text section
	#
	subpart = writer.nextpart()
	subpart.addheader("Content-Transfer-Encoding", "quoted-printable")
	pout = subpart.startbody("text/plain", [("charset", 'us-ascii')])
	mimetools.encode(txtin, pout, 'quoted-printable')
	txtin.close()
	#
	# start the html subpart of the message
	#
	subpart = writer.nextpart()
	subpart.addheader("Content-Transfer-Encoding", "quoted-printable")
	#
	# returns us a file-ish object we can write to
	#
	pout = subpart.startbody("text/html", [("charset", 'us-ascii')])
	mimetools.encode(htmlin, pout, 'quoted-printable')
	htmlin.close()
	#
	# Now that we're done, close our writer and
	# return the message body
	#
	writer.lastpart()
	msg = out.getvalue()
	out.close()
	print msg
	return msg

if __name__=="__main__":
	import smtplib
	f = open("newsletter.html", 'r')
	html = f.read()
	f.close()
	f = open("newsletter.txt", 'r')
	text = f.read()
	subject = "Today's Newsletter!"
	message = createhtmlmail(html, text, subject)
	server = smtplib.SMTP("localhost")
	server.sendmail('agillesp@i-noSPAMSUCKS.com', 'agillesp@i-noSPAMSUCKS.com', message)
	server.quit()

Discussion:

Although the karmic outcome of foisting HTML mail upon the masses is questionable, it seems HTML mail is here to stay. As long as you're conscientious about sending along a plain text version for users who prefer text e-mail, you probably won't get flamed too badly.

The following page http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/mime/ helped me out quite a bit when I was tracking down this problem. Henry Minsky does a good job of sorting out the myriad related RFCs and the fact that there really is no standard for HTML mail.

I hope this is useful. Let me know at agillesp@i-noSPAMSUCKS.com