How to send email attachments?

Question

I am having problems understanding how to email an attachment using Python. I have successfully emailed simple messages with the smtplib. Could someone please e

Answer 1

Other answers are excellent, though I still wanted to share a different approach in case someone is looking for alternatives.

Main difference here is that using this approach you can use HTML/CSS to format your message, so you can get creative and give some styling to your email. Though you aren't enforced to use HTML, you can also still use only plain text.

Notice that this function accepts sending the email to multiple recipients and also allows to attach multiple files.

I've only tried this on Python 2, but I think it should work fine on 3 as well:

import os.path
import smtplib
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.mime.application import MIMEApplication

def send_email(subject, message, from_email, to_email=[], attachment=[]):
    """
    :param subject: email subject
    :param message: Body content of the email (string), can be HTML/CSS or plain text
    :param from_email: Email address from where the email is sent
    :param to_email: List of email recipients, example: ["a@a.com", "b@b.com"]
    :param attachment: List of attachments, exmaple: ["file1.txt", "file2.txt"]
    """
    msg = MIMEMultipart()
    msg['Subject'] = subject
    msg['From'] = from_email
    msg['To'] = ", ".join(to_email)
    msg.attach(MIMEText(message, 'html'))

    for f in attachment:
        with open(f, 'rb') as a_file:
            basename = os.path.basename(f)
            part = MIMEApplication(a_file.read(), Name=basename)

        part['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename="%s"' % basename
        msg.attach(part)

    email = smtplib.SMTP('your-smtp-host-name.com')
    email.sendmail(from_email, to_email, msg.as_string())

I hope this helps! :-)