Emailing an excel sheet with SSL in Python

Question

this is my first post so let me know if there are any common courtesies I should know about.

I just started programming 8 months ago, so I am fairly new. I have been doing some projects to get better. A project I'm working on now creates an Excel sheet from inputted data. It's in Python, which I just started learning a couple of weeks ago. I'm attempting to embed part of this Excel sheet into an email, sent from my school address. I have spent hours looking this up, and to no avail.

There are two problems I am asking for help with:

1) The following code works for sending email from GMail, but not my school account. Unfortunately, I have been having a problem setting up outgoing email for this account on my iPhone as well. It may be related? Would anyone have idea why this code doesn't work?

import smtplib
from email.MIMEText import MIMEText

LOGIN = 'myemailaddress'
PASSWORD = 'mypassword'


def send_email(subject, message, from_addr=LOGIN, to_addr=LOGIN):
    msg = MIMEText(message)
    msg['Subject'] = subject
    msg['From'] = from_addr
    msg['To'] = to_addr

    server = smtplib.SMTP('myhost',465)
    server.ehlo()
    server.starttls()
    server.ehlo()
    server.login(LOGIN,PASSWORD)
    server.sendmail(from_addr, to_addr, msg.as_string())
    server.close()


if __name__=="__main__":
    send_email('test', 'This is a test email', "myemailaddress", "myemailaddress")

2) Excel has an option of saving a sheet as a HTML. When doing so, I copy and pasted the HTML source and emailed it as an attachment. Unfortunately, the colored text did not transfer over. Does anyone know of a better way of using Python to send an excel sheet embedded in an email?

Thanks for your help!

Since you asked, it is best to put separate questions in separate posts on stack overflow. — msw, May 17 '10 at 02:40
Neither of these questions have any apparent relationship to Python, or programming. You should edit in what code is failing you in question (1), question (2) is about Excel and its HTML export and won't be answered here. Superuser.com might be suitable for question 2. http://superuser.com/faq — msw, May 17 '10 at 02:43
I made an edit to question (1), and I do believe question (2) is quite relevant to Python programming. I am asking for how I could use Python to embed an excel sheet in an email, because my HTML idea wasn't working. — jakecar, May 17 '10 at 02:54
So what isn't working about the code you posted? Does it execute and no mail is sent? Does it raise an exception? Is the MIME malformed? etc. — msw, May 17 '10 at 03:47
Well, I leave it running for 5 min or so until I ctrl+c the command line with no exceptions raised and the email not sent. What's posted after I ctrl+c is too long for a comment here, but it involves different lines of code from the smtplib and socket libraries, but no exceptions (just KeyboardInterrupt) — jakecar, May 17 '10 at 04:07

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:12

More information is needed to determine the actual error. To obtain this, turn on debug logging for the smtplib module, you can do this by adding the following line before ehlo().

server.set_debuglevel(True)

If myhost is the school's mail server, then the problem is most likely that the school mail server is not listening on port 465. If myhost is Google's mail server then most likely port 465 (SMTPS) is being blocked by the school network.

Research how non-text files and content are included in e-mail (i.e. MIME attachments). If you are wanting to attach the html to the e-mail but if the intent is just to send the Excel spreadsheet then attach the spreadsheet - there is no need to convert it to HTML. Here is a StackOverflow post on the code to do so: How to send email attachments with Python

Emailing an excel sheet with SSL in Python

1 Answers1