Hello there👋, have you ever wanted to automatically send emails programmatically? Today, we shall see how to achieve this in just a few lines of code.

We shall be using the SMTP protocol client to send emails to Gmail Server particularly.

The smtplib module defines an SMTP client session object that can be used to send mail to any Internet machine with an SMTP or ESMTP listener daemon.

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We shall also use the email module. The email package is a library for managing email messages.

🔸 Code

Let's begin by importing the necessary modules in a newly created py file.

import smtplib
from email.message import EmailMessage

Let's initialise the message object;

msg = EmailMessage()

Now let's populate our message object with the message information.

msg['From'] = "sender@gmail.com"
msg['To'] = "recipient@gmail.com"
msg['Subject'] = "Sending Emails With Python!"
message = msg.set_content("We are using Python >>")

We finally initialise our mail client;

server = smtplib.SMTP_SSL('smtp.gmail.com', 465)
server.login("yourmail@gmail.com", "yourpassword")
server.send_message(msg)
server.quit()

We start by creating our own SMTP server on port 465 and passing in real Gmail account credentials.

Please Note:
You will need to update your Gmail account settings to enable connection and use with less secure accounts. It is a service that Google may soon deprecate or take off for security reasons.

This setting is not available for accounts with 2-Step Verification.

Visit Account Settings page to get started

Let's finally add a print() statement for a successful transaction and wrap our entire code in a function to look like this;

import smtplib
from email.message import EmailMessage

def send_email(send_email_to):
      msg = EmailMessage()

      msg['From'] = "sender@gmail.com"
      msg['To'] = send_email_to
      msg['Subject'] = "Sending Emails With Python!"
      message = msg.set_content("We are using Python >>")

      # Send the message via our own SMTP server.
      server = smtplib.SMTP_SSL('smtp.gmail.com', 465)
      server.login("yourmail@gmail.com", "yourpassword")
      server.send_message(msg)
      server.quit()

      # prints to your console
      print("Successfully sent email to %s:" % (msg['To']))

Notice, I added a send_email_to variable that will be passed as an argument every time the send_email function is called.

So, if we used the real credentials and ran our file by calling the function send_email("recipientmail@gmail.com"), we would get;

GitHub Repo:

🔸 Conclusion

Once again, hope you learned something today from my little closet.

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