Receive and send emails in python

joshhunt_2592 0
Viewed 52530

How can I receive and send email in python? A 'mail server' of sorts.

I am looking into making an app that listens to see if it receives an email addressed to foo@bar.domain.com, and sends an email to the sender.

Now, am I able to do this all in python, would it be best to use 3rd party libraries?

email python
9 Answers

Here is a very simple example:

import smtplib

server = 'mail.server.com'
user = ''
password = ''

recipients = ['user@mail.com', 'other@mail.com']
sender = 'you@mail.com'
message = 'Hello World'

session = smtplib.SMTP(server)
# if your SMTP server doesn't need authentications,
# you don't need the following line:
session.login(user, password)
session.sendmail(sender, recipients, message)

For more options, error handling, etc, look at the smtplib module documentation.

user_236570

I do not think it would be a good idea to write a real mail server in Python. This is certainly possible (see mcrute's and Manuel Ceron's posts to have details) but it is a lot of work when you think of everything that a real mail server must handle (queuing, retransmission, dealing with spam, etc).

You should explain in more detail what you need. If you just want to react to incoming email, I would suggest to configure the mail server to call a program when it receives the email. This program could do what it wants (updating a database, creating a file, talking to another Python program).

To call an arbitrary program from the mail server, you have several choices:

  1. For sendmail and Postfix, a ~/.forward containing "|/path/to/program"
  2. If you use procmail, a recipe action of |path/to/program
  3. And certainly many others
user_156250

Python has an SMTPD module that will be helpful to you for writing a server. You'll probably also want the SMTP module to do the re-send. Both modules are in the standard library at least since version 2.3.

mcrute_337860

poplib and smtplib will be your friends when developing your app.

user_278700

The sending part has been covered, for the receiving you can use pop or imap

Toni_Rua_62670

Depending on the amount of mail you are sending you might want to look into using a real mail server like postifx or sendmail (*nix systems) Both of those programs have the ability to send a received mail to a program based on the email address.

epochwolf_162040

You can use emailpy

Install via pip3 install emailpy

import emailpy
manager = emailpy.EmailManager('your email', 'your password')
msg = manager.send(['who you are sending to', 'the other email you are sending to', subject='hello', body='this email is sent from Python', html='<h1>Hello World!</h1>', attachments=['yourfile.txt', 'yourotherfile.py'])
while not msg.sent:
    pass
print('sent')
messages = manager.read()
for message in messages:
    print(message.sender, message.date, message.subject, message.body, message.html, message.attachments)
    for attachment in message.attachments:
        print(attachment.name)
        attachment.download()
user_149232600
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