372

How to send HTML content in email using Python? I can send simple texts.

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  • 2
    Just a big fat warning. If you are sending non-ASCII email using Python < 3.0, consider using the email in Django. It wraps UTF-8 strings correctly, and also is much simpler to use. You have been warned :-) Commented Dec 14, 2009 at 14:42
  • 3
    If you want to send a HTML with unicode see here: stackoverflow.com/questions/36397827/… Commented Apr 11, 2016 at 10:53

12 Answers 12

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550

From Python v2.7.14 documentation - 18.1.11. email: Examples:

Here’s an example of how to create an HTML message with an alternative plain text version:

#! /usr/bin/python

import smtplib

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

# me == my email address
# you == recipient's email address
me = "[email protected]"
you = "[email protected]"

# Create message container - the correct MIME type is multipart/alternative.
msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
msg['Subject'] = "Link"
msg['From'] = me
msg['To'] = you

# Create the body of the message (a plain-text and an HTML version).
text = "Hi!\nHow are you?\nHere is the link you wanted:\nhttp://www.python.org"
html = """\
<html>
  <head></head>
  <body>
    <p>Hi!<br>
       How are you?<br>
       Here is the <a href="http://www.python.org">link</a> you wanted.
    </p>
  </body>
</html>
"""

# Record the MIME types of both parts - text/plain and text/html.
part1 = MIMEText(text, 'plain')
part2 = MIMEText(html, 'html')

# Attach parts into message container.
# According to RFC 2046, the last part of a multipart message, in this case
# the HTML message, is best and preferred.
msg.attach(part1)
msg.attach(part2)

# Send the message via local SMTP server.
s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
# sendmail function takes 3 arguments: sender's address, recipient's address
# and message to send - here it is sent as one string.
s.sendmail(me, you, msg.as_string())
s.quit()
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13 Comments

Is it possible to attach a third and a fourth part, both of which are attachments (one ASCII, one binary)? How would one do that? Thanks.
Hi, I noticed that in the end you quit the s object. What if I want to send multiple messages? Should I quit everytime I send the message or send them all (in a for loop) and then quit once and for all?
Make sure to attach html last, as the preferred(showing) part will be the one attached last. # According to RFC 2046, the last part of a multipart message, in this case # the HTML message, is best and preferred. I wish i read this 2hrs ago
Warning: this fails if you have non-ascii characters in the text.
Hmm, I get the error for msg.as_string(): list object has no attribute encode
|
88

Here is a Gmail implementation of the accepted answer:

import smtplib

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

# me == my email address
# you == recipient's email address
me = "[email protected]"
you = "[email protected]"

# Create message container - the correct MIME type is multipart/alternative.
msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
msg['Subject'] = "Link"
msg['From'] = me
msg['To'] = you

# Create the body of the message (a plain-text and an HTML version).
text = "Hi!\nHow are you?\nHere is the link you wanted:\nhttp://www.python.org"
html = """\
<html>
  <head></head>
  <body>
    <p>Hi!<br>
       How are you?<br>
       Here is the <a href="http://www.python.org">link</a> you wanted.
    </p>
  </body>
</html>
"""

# Record the MIME types of both parts - text/plain and text/html.
part1 = MIMEText(text, 'plain')
part2 = MIMEText(html, 'html')

# Attach parts into message container.
# According to RFC 2046, the last part of a multipart message, in this case
# the HTML message, is best and preferred.
msg.attach(part1)
msg.attach(part2)
# Send the message via local SMTP server.
mail = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com', 587)

mail.ehlo()

mail.starttls()

mail.login('userName', 'password')
mail.sendmail(me, you, msg.as_string())
mail.quit()
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5 Comments

Great code, it works for me, if i turned on low security in google
I use a google application specific password with python smtplib, did the trick without having to go low security.
for anyone reading the above comments: You only require an "App Password" if you have previously enabled 2 step verification in your Gmail account.
Is there a way to append something dynamically in the HTML part of the message?
Somehow only the last attached part seems to work.
72

You might try using my mailer module.

from mailer import Mailer
from mailer import Message

message = Message(From="[email protected]",
                  To="[email protected]")
message.Subject = "An HTML Email"
message.Html = """<p>Hi!<br>
   How are you?<br>
   Here is the <a href="http://www.python.org">link</a> you wanted.</p>"""

sender = Mailer('smtp.example.com')
sender.send(message)
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5 Comments

Mailer module is great however it claims to work with Gmail, but doesn't and there are no docs.
@MFB -- Have you tried the Bitbucket repo? bitbucket.org/ginstrom/mailer
For gmail one should provide use_tls=True,usr='email' and pwd='password' when initializing Mailer and it will work.
I would recommend adding to your code the following line right after the message.Html line: message.Body = """Some text to show when the client cannot show HTML emails"""
great but how to add the variables values to the link i mean creating a link like this <a href="python.org/somevalues">link</a> So that i can access that values from the routes it goes to . Thanks
70

Here is a simple way to send an HTML email, just by specifying the Content-Type header as 'text/html':

import email.message
import smtplib

msg = email.message.Message()
msg['Subject'] = 'foo'
msg['From'] = '[email protected]'
msg['To'] = '[email protected]'
msg.add_header('Content-Type','text/html')
msg.set_payload('Body of <b>message</b>')

# Send the message via local SMTP server.
s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
s.starttls()
s.login(email_login,
        email_passwd)
s.sendmail(msg['From'], [msg['To']], msg.as_string())
s.quit()
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3 Comments

This is a nice simple answer, handy for quick and dirty scripts, thanks. BTW one can refer to the accepted answer for a simple smtplib.SMTP() example, which doesn't use tls. I used this for an internal script at work where we use ssmtp and a local mailhub. Also, this example is missing s.quit().
"mailmerge_conf.smtp_server" is not defined... at least is what Python 3.6 says...
Absolutely beautiful! Adding .add_header and using .set_payload instead of .set_content worked like a charm for me! Emails looking snazzy now. Thanks again!
69

for python3, improve @taltman 's answer:

  • use email.message.EmailMessage instead of email.message.Message to construct email.
  • use email.set_content func, assign subtype='html' argument. instead of low level func set_payload and add header manually.
  • use SMTP.send_message func instead of SMTP.sendmail func to send email.
  • use with block to auto close connection.
from email.message import EmailMessage
from smtplib import SMTP

# construct email
email = EmailMessage()
email['Subject'] = 'foo'
email['From'] = '[email protected]'
email['To'] = '[email protected]'
email.set_content('<font color="red">red color text</font>', subtype='html')

# Send the message via local SMTP server.
with SMTP('localhost') as s:
    s.login('foo_user', 'bar_password')
    s.send_message(email)
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4 Comments

As an improvement to this if you want to send an attachment in addition, use email.add_alternative() (in the same way as you have with email.set_content() to add HTML, and then add an attachment using email.add_attachment() (This took me bloomin ages to figure out)
The EmailMessage API was only officially available starting in Python 3.6, though it was shipped as an alternative already in 3.3. New code should absolutely use this instead of the old email.message.Message legacy API which most of the answers here unfortunately still suggest. Anything with MIMEText or MIMEMultipart is the old API and should be avoided unless you have legacy reasons.
is there a way to use a file instead of typing out the HTML in email.set context?
I found the way to add a HTML files. ``` report_file = open('resetpasswordemail.html') html = report_file.read() em.set_content(html, subtype='html')```
12

Here's sample code. This is inspired from code found on the Python Cookbook site (can't find the exact link)

def createhtmlmail (html, text, subject, fromEmail):
    """Create a mime-message that will render HTML in popular
    MUAs, text in better ones"""
    import MimeWriter
    import mimetools
    import cStringIO

    out = cStringIO.StringIO() # output buffer for our message 
    htmlin = cStringIO.StringIO(html)
    txtin = cStringIO.StringIO(text)

    writer = MimeWriter.MimeWriter(out)
    #
    # set up some basic headers... we put subject here
    # because smtplib.sendmail expects it to be in the
    # message body
    #
    writer.addheader("From", fromEmail)
    writer.addheader("Subject", subject)
    writer.addheader("MIME-Version", "1.0")
    #
    # start the multipart section of the message
    # multipart/alternative seems to work better
    # on some MUAs than multipart/mixed
    #
    writer.startmultipartbody("alternative")
    writer.flushheaders()
    #
    # the plain text section
    #
    subpart = writer.nextpart()
    subpart.addheader("Content-Transfer-Encoding", "quoted-printable")
    pout = subpart.startbody("text/plain", [("charset", 'us-ascii')])
    mimetools.encode(txtin, pout, 'quoted-printable')
    txtin.close()
    #
    # start the html subpart of the message
    #
    subpart = writer.nextpart()
    subpart.addheader("Content-Transfer-Encoding", "quoted-printable")
    #
    # returns us a file-ish object we can write to
    #
    pout = subpart.startbody("text/html", [("charset", 'us-ascii')])
    mimetools.encode(htmlin, pout, 'quoted-printable')
    htmlin.close()
    #
    # Now that we're done, close our writer and
    # return the message body
    #
    writer.lastpart()
    msg = out.getvalue()
    out.close()
    print msg
    return msg

if __name__=="__main__":
    import smtplib
    html = 'html version'
    text = 'TEST VERSION'
    subject = "BACKUP REPORT"
    message = createhtmlmail(html, text, subject, 'From Host <[email protected]>')
    server = smtplib.SMTP("smtp_server_address","smtp_port")
    server.login('username', 'password')
    server.sendmail('[email protected]', '[email protected]', message)
    server.quit()
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2 Comments

FYI; this came from code.activestate.com/recipes/67083-send-html-mail-from-python/…
This is even older and cruftier than the email.message.Message API. The MimeWriter library was deprecated in Python 2.3 in 2003.
7

Actually, yagmail took a bit different approach.

It will by default send HTML, with automatic fallback for incapable email-readers. It is not the 17th century anymore.

Of course, it can be overridden, but here goes:

import yagmail
yag = yagmail.SMTP("[email protected]", "mypassword")

html_msg = """<p>Hi!<br>
              How are you?<br>
              Here is the <a href="http://www.python.org">link</a> you wanted.</p>"""

yag.send("[email protected]", "the subject", html_msg)

For installation instructions and many more great features, have a look at the github.

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1 Comment

Only helpful for gmail users
6

Here's a working example to send plain text and HTML emails from Python using smtplib along with the CC and BCC options.

https://varunver.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/python-smtplib-send-plaintext-and-html-emails/

#!/usr/bin/env python
import smtplib
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

def send_mail(params, type_):
      email_subject = params['email_subject']
      email_from = "[email protected]"
      email_to = params['email_to']
      email_cc = params.get('email_cc')
      email_bcc = params.get('email_bcc')
      email_body = params['email_body']

      msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
      msg['To'] = email_to
      msg['CC'] = email_cc
      msg['Subject'] = email_subject
      mt_html = MIMEText(email_body, type_)
      msg.attach(mt_html)

      server = smtplib.SMTP('YOUR_MAIL_SERVER.DOMAIN.COM')
      server.set_debuglevel(1)
      toaddrs = [email_to] + [email_cc] + [email_bcc]
      server.sendmail(email_from, toaddrs, msg.as_string())
      server.quit()

# Calling the mailer functions
params = {
    'email_to': '[email protected]',
    'email_cc': '[email protected]',
    'email_bcc': '[email protected]',
    'email_subject': 'Test message from python library',
    'email_body': '<h1>Hello World</h1>'
}
for t in ['plain', 'html']:
    send_mail(params, t)
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1 Comment

Think this answer covers everything. Great link
4

In case you want something simpler:

from redmail import EmailSender
email = EmailSender(host="smtp.myhost.com", port=1)

email.send(
    subject="Example email",
    sender="[email protected]",
    receivers=["[email protected]"],
    html="<h1>Hi, this is HTML body</h1>"
)

Pip install Red Mail from PyPI:

pip install redmail

Red Mail has most likely all you need from sending emails and it has a lot of features including:

Documentation: https://red-mail.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

Source code: https://github.com/Miksus/red-mail

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4

I may be late in providing an answer here, but the Question asked a way to send HTML emails. Using a dedicated module like "email" is okay, but we can achieve the same results without using any new module. It all boils down to the Gmail Protocol.

Below is my simple sample code for sending HTML mail only by using "smtplib" and nothing else. This code is suitable for sending simple and small HTML Contents only.

import smtplib

FROM = "[email protected]"
TO = "[email protected]"
SUBJECT= "Subject"
PWD = "thesecretkey"

TEXT="""
<h1>Hello</h1>
""" #Your Message (Even Supports HTML Directly)

message = f"Subject: {SUBJECT}\nFrom: {FROM}\nTo: {TO}\nContent-Type: text/html\n\n{TEXT}" #This is where the stuff happens

try:
    server=smtplib.SMTP("smtp.gmail.com",587)
    server.ehlo()
    server.starttls()
    server.login(FROM,PWD)
    server.sendmail(FROM,TO,message)
    server.close()
    print("Successfully sent the mail.")
except Exception as e:
    print("Failed to send the mail..", e)
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1 Comment

The email library is not a "new module", it is part of the standard library just like smtplib. You should absolutely not create messages by combining strings like this; it will seem to work for very simple messages, but fail in catastrophic ways as soon as you move outside the comfortable realm of a single text/plain payload with only 7-bit US-ASCII contents (and even then there are corner cases which are likely to trip you up, especially if you don't know exactly what you are doing).
2

Here is my answer for AWS using boto3

    subject = "Hello"
    html = "<b>Hello Consumer</b>"

    client = boto3.client('ses', region_name='us-east-1', aws_access_key_id="your_key",
                      aws_secret_access_key="your_secret")

client.send_email(
    Source='ACME <[email protected]>',
    Destination={'ToAddresses': [email]},
    Message={
        'Subject': {'Data': subject},
        'Body': {
            'Html': {'Data': html}
        }
    }
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Comments

2

Simplest solution for sending email from Organizational account in Office 365:

from O365 import Message

html_template =     """ 
            <html>
            <head>
                <title></title>
            </head>
            <body>
                    {}
            </body>
            </html>
        """

final_html_data = html_template.format(df.to_html(index=False))

o365_auth = ('sender_username@company_email.com','Password')
m = Message(auth=o365_auth)
m.setRecipients('receiver_username@company_email.com')
m.setSubject('Weekly report')
m.setBodyHTML(final_html_data)
m.sendMessage()

here df is a dataframe converted to html Table, which is being injected to html_template

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1 Comment

The question doesn't mention anything about using Office or an organizational account. Good contribution but not very helpful to the asker

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