`email`: Examples

Here are a few examples of how to use the email package to read, write, and send simple email messages, as well as more complex MIME messages.

First, let's see how to create and send a simple text message (both the text content and the addresses may contain Unicode characters):

Parsing 822 headers can easily be done by the using the classes from the ~email.parser module:

Here's an example of how to send a MIME message containing a bunch of family pictures that may be residing in a directory:

Here's an example of how to send the entire contents of a directory as an email message:[^1]

Here's an example of how to unpack a MIME message like the one above, into a directory of files:

Here's an example of how to create an HTML message with an alternative plain text version. To make things a bit more interesting, we include a related image in the html part, and we save a copy of what we are going to send to disk, as well as sending it.

If we were sent the message from the last example, here is one way we could process it:

Up to the prompt, the output from the above is:

To: Penelope Pussycat <penelope@example.com>, Fabrette Pussycat <fabrette@example.com>
From: Pepé Le Pew <pepe@example.com>
Subject: Pourquoi pas des asperges pour ce midi ?

Salut!

Cette recette [1] sera sûrement un très bon repas.

Footnotes

[^1]: Thanks to Matthew Dixon Cowles for the original inspiration and examples.