MIME Attachments won't send with Subject Line

Question

I'm having trouble with a bit of code sending an email with attachments AND a Subject line.

# Code exerpt from Oli:     http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3362600/how-to-send-email-attachments-with-python
# Emails aren't sending with a subject--need to fix this.
def send_mail(self, send_from, send_to, subject, text, files=None, server="localhost"):
    assert isinstance(send_to, list)

    msg = MIMEMultipart(
        Subject=subject,
        From=send_from,
        To=COMMASPACE.join(send_to),
        Date=formatdate(localtime=True)
    )

    msg.attach(MIMEText(text))

    for f in files or []:
        with open(f, "rb") as fil:
            msg.attach(MIMEApplication(
            fil.read(),
               Content_Disposition='attachment; filename="%s"' % basename(f),
               Name=basename(f)
            ))

    smtp = smtplib.SMTP(server)
    smtp.sendmail(send_from, send_to, msg.as_string())
    smtp.close()

This code sends an email fine, but it is not deliminating the 'Subject' line and the emails it sends have a subject line of "NO SUBJECT.' Here's what it shows when I print the first part of the MIME msg:

From nobody Thu Oct 29 16:17:38 2015
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; date="Thu, 29 Oct 2015 16:17:38 +0000";
to="me@email.com";
from="someserver@somewhere.com"; subject="TESTING";
boundary="===============0622475305469306134=="
MIME-Version: 1.0

--===============0622475305469306134==
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Here we go, oh! ho! ho!
--===============0622475305469306134==
Content-Type: application/octet-stream; Content-  Disposition="attachment;
filename=\"Log_Mill.py\""; Name="Log_Mill.py"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

I might be able to figure it out if I plug away for hours and hours, but I'm hoping to avoid the extra work for such a trivial fix.

Any help is appreciated!

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 29 '15 at 18:32

You could also use a package specialised for writing HTML emails, showing pictures inline and easily attach files!

The package I'm referring to is yagmail and I'm the developer/maintainer.

import yagmail
yag = yagmail.SMTP('email@email.com', 'email_pwd')
file_names = ['/local/path/f.mp3', '/local/path/f.txt', '/local/path/f.avi']
yag.send('to@email.com', 'Sample subject', contents = ['This is text'] + filenames)

That's all there is to it.

Use pip install yagmail to obtain your copy.

Contents can be a list where you also add text, you can just only have the file_names as contents, awesome no?

It reads the file, magically determines the encoding, and attached it :)

Read the github for other tricks like passwordless scripts, aliasing and what not.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 02 '15 at 13:14

You are assigning the Subject etc. as attributes of the multipart container, but that's incorrect. The headers you want to specify should be passed to the msg itself as headers instead, like this:

msg = MIMEMultipart()
msg['Subject'] = subject
msg['From'] = send_from
msg['To'] = COMMASPACE.join(send_to)
msg['Date'] = formatdate(localtime=True)

The output should look more like

From nobody Thu Oct 29 16:17:38 2015
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2015 16:17:38 +0000
To: <me@email.com>
From: <someserver@somewhere.com>
Subject: TESTING
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; 
   boundary="===============0622475305469306134=="
MIME-Version: 1.0

--===============0622475305469306134==
Content-Type: text/plain; .......

So...I had tried that before and it didn't work. Oh well--seems to work now. Thanks!! — Adam Elliott, Dec 03 '15 at 21:24

MIME Attachments won't send with Subject Line

2 Answers2