:mod:`email`: Examples

.. _email-examples:

: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:

.. code-block:: none

To: Penelope Pussycat <[email protected]>, Fabrette Pussycat <[email protected]>
From: Pepé Le Pew <[email protected]>
Subject: Pourquoi pas des asperges pour ce midi ?

Salut!

Cette recette [1] sera sûrement un très bon repas.

.. rubric:: Footnotes

.. [1] Thanks to Matthew Dixon Cowles for the original inspiration and examples.