How do I send HTML Formatted emails, through the gmail-api for python

Question

Using the sample code from the GMail API Example: Send Mail, and after following rules for authentication, it\'s simple enough to send a programmatically generated email, via a

Answer 1

After doing a lot of digging around, I started looking in to the python side of the message handling, and noticed that a python object is actually constructing the message to be sent for base64 encoding into the gmail-api message object constructor.

See line 63 from above: message = MIMEText(message_text)

The one trick that finally worked for me, after all the attempts to modify the header values and payload dict (which is a member of the message object), was to set (line 63):

• message = MIMEText(message_text, 'html') <-- add the 'html' as the second parameter of the MIMEText object constructor

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The default code supplied by Google for their gmail API only tells you how to send plain text emails, but they hide how they're doing that. ala... message = MIMEText(message_text)

I had to look up the python class email.mime.text.MIMEText object. That's where you'll see this definition of the constructor for the MIMEText object:

• class email.mime.text.MIMEText(_text[, _subtype[, _charset]]) We want to explicitly pass it a value to the _subtype. In this case, we want to pass: 'html' as the _subtype.

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Now, you won't have anymore unexpected word wrapping applied to your messages by Google, or the Python mime.text.MIMEText object

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The Fixed Code

def create_message(sender, to, cc, subject, message_text):
    """Create a message for an email.

    Args:
    sender: Email address of the sender.
    to: Email address of the receiver.
    subject: The subject of the email message.
    message_text: The text of the email message.

    Returns:
    An object containing a base64url encoded email object.
    """
    print(sender + ', ' + to + ', ' + subject + ', ' + message_text)
    message = MIMEText(message_text,'html')
    message['to'] = to
    message['from'] = sender
    message['subject'] = subject
    message['cc'] = cc
    pprint(message)
    return {'raw': base64.urlsafe_b64encode(message.as_string())}