:mod:`email`: Examples

Here are a few examples of how to use the :mod:`email` package to read, write, and send simple email messages, as well as more complex MIME messages.

First, let's see how to create and send a simple text message (both the text content and the addresses may contain unicode characters):

.. literalinclude:: ../includes/email-simple.py

Parsing RFC 822 headers can easily be done by the using the classes from the :mod:`~email.parser` module:

.. literalinclude:: ../includes/email-headers.py

Here's an example of how to send a MIME message containing a bunch of family pictures that may be residing in a directory:

.. literalinclude:: ../includes/email-mime.py

Here's an example of how to send the entire contents of a directory as an email message: [1]

.. literalinclude:: ../includes/email-dir.py

Here's an example of how to unpack a MIME message like the one above, into a directory of files:

.. literalinclude:: ../includes/email-unpack.py

Here's an example of how to create an HTML message with an alternative plain text version. To make things a bit more interesting, we include a related image in the html part, and we save a copy of what we are going to send to disk, as well as sending it.

.. literalinclude:: ../includes/email-alternative.py

If we were sent the message from the last example, here is one way we could process it:

.. literalinclude:: ../includes/email-read-alternative.py

Up to the prompt, the output from the above is:

To: Penelope Pussycat <penelope@example.com>, Fabrette Pussycat <fabrette@example.com>
From: Pepé Le Pew <pepe@example.com>
Subject: Ayons asperges pour le déjeuner

Salut!

Cela ressemble à un excellent recipie[1] déjeuner.

Footnotes