Sending Emails with Python

After a couple hours of struggling to find a template that worked to send a simple email, after 5 versions attempting the code, and after much browsing through Python tutorials that claimed to have the answer, I finally found code that worked! Here is the basic structure of Python code that works (at least for me) to send an email:



The code is pretty simple. I start by importing the Python library smtplib, which allows us to send emails. Then I define constants such as email credentials as well as the message I wish to display, which I will use later. Next, I connect to the server, inputing the proper IP address and port for the gmail server from which I will be sending emails. Note that I created a new gmail account for the purpose of this project and I hid the password in the snip. The line that reads "server.startttls()" is a security function that protects my password when the code is running. The last three lines of code input the login credentials to the server, send the email, and quit the server.

Now, to put this together with the rest of our code.

First, I called the sendEmail method from the main method, inputting all the claim information for the claim whose email is to be sent:



Here is the method to send the email:


And the formatted email that the program successfully sends:



I had a lot of trouble getting a basic email to send. Like I said, I went through at least 5 different sources (and several hours) to find one that had code that worked for me. Even then, I had to make some adjustments for the program to fit my needs. A lot of the confusion for me came from the following bit of code:



What this code does is assign the From and To addresses and the Subject into the appropriate fields for the recipient of the email to see. Doing this, allows the expanded information to display to show the details of the email (sender, recipient, subject):




To test that the program works, to send more than one email, I created a new claim in the csv file with valid information to send to another one of my email accounts. The email did successfully send!

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask in the comments!


Sources:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/399129/failing-to-send-email-with-the-python-example
http://naelshiab.com/tutorial-send-email-python/