Python easy mail libraryDocumentation

Release 1.0.2

Alain Spineux

Oct 31, 2017

Contents

1 Download and Install 3

2 Support for Python 3.x 5

3 Use pyzmail 7

4 Documentation 94.1 Articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94.2 API documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

5 Support 11

6 Quick Example 136.1 Compose an email . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136.2 Send an email . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146.3 Parse an email . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

7 Tricks 177.1 Embedding image in HTML email . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

8 Scripts 198.1 pyzsendmail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198.2 pyzinfomail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

9 License 21

10 Links 23

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Python easy mail library Documentation, Release 1.0.2

pyzmail is a high level mail library for Python. It provides functions and classes that help for reading, composing andsending emails. pyzmail exists because their is no reasons that handling mails with Python would be more difficultthan with popular mail clients like Outlook or Thunderbird. pyzmail hides the complexity of the MIME structure andMIME encoding/decoding. It also make the problems of the internationalization encoding/decoding simpler.

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Python easy mail library Documentation, Release 1.0.2

2 Contents

CHAPTER 1

Download and Install

pyzmail is available for Python 2.6+ and 3.2+ from pypi and can be easily installed using the easy_install successornamed distribute and pip using

$ pip install pyzmail

to quickly install distribute and pip, use

curl -O http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.pypython distribute_setup.pyeasy_install pip

pyzmail can be installed the old way from sources. Download the archive from pypi and extract its content into adirectory. cd into this directory and run:

> cd pyzmail-X.X.X> python setup.py install

Binary version of the scripts for Windows pyzmail-1.0.2-win32.zip can be downloaded from here.

pyzmail sources are also available on github https://github.com/aspineux/pyzmail

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4 Chapter 1. Download and Install

CHAPTER 2

Support for Python 3.x

Python 3.2+ supported

Python 3.2 is supported and has been tested. Python 3.0 and 3.1 are not supported because none of them pro-vide functions to handle 8bits encoded emails like in 3.2 ( email.message_from_bytes() & email.message_from_binary_file() )

At installation time, pyzmail sources are automatically converted by distribute using 2to3.

Unfortunately, scripts are not converted in the process. You can convert them using 2to3 yourself (adapt paths to fityou configuration):

/opt/python-3.2.2/bin/2to3 --no-diffs --write --nobackups /opt/python-3.2.2/bin/→˓pyzinfomail/opt/python-3.2.2/bin/2to3 --no-diffs --write --nobackups /opt/python-3.2.2/bin/→˓pyzsendmail

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CHAPTER 3

Use pyzmail

The package is split into 3 modules:

• generate: Useful functions to compose and send mail s

• parse: Useful functions to parse emails

• utils: Various functions used by other modules

Most important functions are available from the top of the pyzmail package.

usage sample:

import pyzmail

#access function from top of pyzmailret=pyzmail.compose_mail('me@foo.com', [ 'him@bar.com'], u'subject', \

'iso-8859-1', ('Hello world', 'us-ascii'))payload=ret[0]print payloadmsg=pyzmail.PyzMessage.factory(payload)print msg.get_subject()

#use more specific function from inside modulesprint pyzmail.generate.format_addresses([('John', 'john@foo.com') ], \

'From', 'us-ascii')print pyzmail.parse.decode_mail_header('=?iso-8859-1?q?Hello?=')

More in the Quick Example section.

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8 Chapter 3. Use pyzmail

CHAPTER 4

Documentation

You can find lots of sample inside the docstrings but also in the tests directory.

The documentation, samples, docstring and articles are all fitted for python 2.x. Some occasional hint give some tricksabout Python 3.x.

Articles

To understand how this library works, you will find these 3 articles very useful. They have been written before the firstrelease of pyzmail and the code has changed a little since:

• Parsing email using Python part 1 of 2 : The Header

• Parsing email using Python part 2 of 2 : The content

• Generate and send mail with python: tutorial

API documentation

The API documentation in epydoc format contains a lot of samples in doctest string. You will find them very usefultoo.

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CHAPTER 5

Support

Ask your questions here

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CHAPTER 6

Quick Example

Lets show you how it works !

Compose an email

import pyzmail

sender=(u'Me', 'me@foo.com')recipients=[(u'Him', 'him@bar.com'), 'just@me.com']subject=u'the subject'text_content=u'Bonjour aux Fran\xe7ais'prefered_encoding='iso-8859-1'text_encoding='iso-8859-1'

payload, mail_from, rcpt_to, msg_id=pyzmail.compose_mail(\sender, \recipients, \subject, \prefered_encoding, \(text_content, text_encoding), \html=None, \attachments=[('attached content', 'text', 'plain', 'text.txt', \

'us-ascii')])

print payload

Look a the output:

Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============1727493275=="MIME-Version: 1.0From: Me <me@foo.com>To: Him <him@bar.com> , just@me.comSubject: the subject

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Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:04:42 +0200

--===============1727493275==Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"MIME-Version: 1.0Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Bonjour aux Fran=E7ais--===============1727493275==Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"MIME-Version: 1.0Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bitContent-Disposition: attachment; filename="text.txt"

attached content--===============1727493275==--

Send an email

First take a look at the other values returned by pyzmail.compose_mail():

print 'Sender address:', mail_fromprint 'Recipients:', rcpt_to

Here are the values I can reuse for my SMTP connection:

Sender address: me@foo.comRecipients: ['him@bar.com', 'just@me.com']

I want to send my email via my Gmail account:

smtp_host='smtp.gmail.com'smtp_port=587smtp_mode='tls'smtp_login='my.gmail.addresse@gmail.com'smtp_password='my.gmail.password'

ret=pyzmail.send_mail(payload, mail_from, rcpt_to, smtp_host, \smtp_port=smtp_port, smtp_mode=smtp_mode, \smtp_login=smtp_login, smtp_password=smtp_password)

if isinstance(ret, dict):if ret:

print 'failed recipients:', ', '.join(ret.keys())else:

print 'success'else:

print 'error:', ret

Here pyzmail.send_mail() combine SSL and authentication.

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Python easy mail library Documentation, Release 1.0.2

Parse an email

Now lets try to read the email we have just composed:

msg=pyzmail.PyzMessage.factory(payload)

print 'Subject: %r' % (msg.get_subject(), )print 'From: %r' % (msg.get_address('from'), )print 'To: %r' % (msg.get_addresses('to'), )print 'Cc: %r' % (msg.get_addresses('cc'), )

Take a look at the outpout:

Subject: u'the subject'From: (u'Me', 'me@foo.com')To: [(u'Him', 'him@bar.com'), (u'just@me.com', 'just@me.com')]Cc: []

And a little further regarding the mail content and attachment:

for mailpart in msg.mailparts:print ' %sfilename=%r alt_filename=%r type=%s charset=%s desc=%s size=%d' % ( \

'*'if mailpart.is_body else ' ', \mailpart.filename, \mailpart.sanitized_filename, \mailpart.type, \mailpart.charset, \mailpart.part.get('Content-Description'), \len(mailpart.get_payload()) )

if mailpart.type.startswith('text/'):# display first line of the textpayload, used_charset=pyzmail.decode_text(mailpart.get_payload(), mailpart.

→˓charset, None)print ' >', payload.split('\\n')[0]

And the output:

*filename=None alt_filename='text.txt' type=text/plain charset=iso-8859-1 desc=None→˓size=20

> Bonjour aux Françaisfilename=u'text.txt' alt_filename='text-01.txt' type=text/plain charset=us-ascii→˓desc=None size=16

> attached content

The first one, with a * is the text content, the second one is the attachment.

You also have direct access to the text and HTML content using:

if msg.text_part!=None:print '-- text --'print msg.text_part.get_payload()

if msg.html_part!=None:print '-- html --'print msg.html_part.get_payload()

And the output:

6.3. Parse an email 15

Python easy mail library Documentation, Release 1.0.2

-- text --Bonjour aux Français

Their is no HTML part !

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CHAPTER 7

Tricks

Embedding image in HTML email

Image embedding differs from linked images in that the image itself is encoded, and included inside the message.Instead of using a normal URL in the IMG tag inside the HTML body, we must use a cid:target reference and assignthis target name to the Content-ID of the embedded file.

See this sample:

import base64import pyzmail

angry_gif=base64.b64decode("""R0lGODlhDgAOALMAAAwMCYAAAACAAKaCIwAAgIAAgACAgPbTfoR/YP8AAAD/AAAA//rMUf8A/wD///Tw5CH5BAAAAAAALAAAAAAOAA4AgwwMCYAAAACAAKaCIwAAgIAAgACAgPbTfoR/YP8AAAD/AAAA//rMUf8A/wD///Tw5AQ28B1Gqz3S6jop2sxnAYNGaghAHirQUZh6sEDGPQgy5/b9UI+eZkAkghhGZPLIbMKcDMwLhIkAADs=""")

text_content=u"I'm very angry. See attached document."html_content=u'<html><body>I\'m very angry. ' \

'<img src="cid:angry_gif" />.\n' \'See attached document.</body></html>'

payload, mail_from, rcpt_to, msg_id=pyzmail.compose_mail(\(u'Me', 'me@foo.com'), \[(u'Him', 'him@bar.com'), 'just@me.com'], \u'the subject', \'iso-8859-1', \(text_content, 'iso-8859-1'), \(html_content, 'iso-8859-1'), \attachments=[('The price of RAM modules is increasing.', \

'text', 'plain', 'text.txt', 'us-ascii'), ],embeddeds=[(angry_gif, 'image', 'gif', 'angry_gif', None), ])

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print payload

And here is the payload:

Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============1435507538=="MIME-Version: 1.0From: Me <me@foo.com>To: Him <him@bar.com> , just@me.comSubject: the subjectDate: Fri, 02 Sep 2011 01:40:52 +0200

--===============1435507538==Content-Type: multipart/related; boundary="===============0638818366=="MIME-Version: 1.0

--===============0638818366==Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="===============0288407648=="MIME-Version: 1.0

--===============0288407648==Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"MIME-Version: 1.0Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

I'm very angry. See attached document.--===============0288407648==Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"MIME-Version: 1.0Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

<html><body>I'm very angry. <img src=3D"cid:angry_gif" />. See attached doc=ument.</body></html>--===============0288407648==----===============0638818366==Content-Type: image/gifMIME-Version: 1.0Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64Content-ID: <angry_gif>Content-Disposition: inline

R0lGODlhDgAOALMAAAwMCYAAAACAAKaCIwAAgIAAgACAgPbTfoR/YP8AAAD/AAAA//rMUf8A/wD///Tw5CH5BAAAAAAALAAAAAAOAA4AgwwMCYAAAACAAKaCIwAAgIAAgACAgPbTfoR/YP8AAAD/AAAA//rMUf8A/wD///Tw5AQ28B1Gqz3S6jop2sxnAYNGaghAHirQUZh6sEDGPQgy5/b9UI+eZkAkghhGZPLIbMKcDMwLhIkAADs=--===============0638818366==----===============1435507538==Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"MIME-Version: 1.0Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bitContent-Disposition: attachment; filename="text.txt"

The price of RAM module is increasing.--===============1435507538==--

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CHAPTER 8

Scripts

Binary executables for Windows of these script are available in the ‘Download‘_ section below.

pyzsendmail

pyzsendmail is a command line script to compose and send simple and complex emails.

Features:

• SSL, TLS , authentication

• HTML content and embedded images

• attachments

• Internationalisation

Read the manual for more.

Under Windows pyzsendmail.exe can replace the now old blat.exe and bmail.exe.

pyzinfomail

pyzinfomail is a command line script reading an email from a file and printing most important information. Mostly toshow how to use pyzmail library. Read the manual for more.

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CHAPTER 9

License

pyzmail iis released under the GNU Lesser General Public License ( LGPL ).

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CHAPTER 10

Links

More links about parsing and writing mail in python

• formataddr() and unicode

• Sending Unicode emails in Python

• Sending Email with smtplib

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