.. _email-examples:
:mod:`email`: Examples
----------------------
Here are a few examples of how to use the :mod:`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):
.. literalinclude:: ../includes/email-simple.py
Parsing :rfc:`822` headers can easily be done by the using the classes
from the :mod:`~email.parser` module:
.. literalinclude:: ../includes/email-headers.py
Here's an example of how to send a MIME message containing a bunch of family
pictures that may be residing in a directory:
.. literalinclude:: ../includes/email-mime.py
Here's an example of how to send the entire contents of a directory as an email
message: [1]_
.. literalinclude:: ../includes/email-dir.py
Here's an example of how to unpack a MIME message like the one
above, into a directory of files:
.. literalinclude:: ../includes/email-unpack.py
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.
.. literalinclude:: ../includes/email-alternative.py
If we were sent the message from the last example, here is one way we could
process it:
.. literalinclude:: ../includes/email-read-alternative.py
Up to the prompt, the output from the above is:
.. code-block:: none
To: Penelope Pussycat <[email protected]>, Fabrette Pussycat <[email protected]>
From: Pepé Le Pew <[email protected]>
Subject: Pourquoi pas des asperges pour ce midi ?
Salut!
Cette recette [1] sera sûrement un très bon repas.
.. rubric:: Footnotes
.. [1] Thanks to Matthew Dixon Cowles for the original inspiration and examples.