Send Email With File Attachment From Python

by Mike Levin

Tuesday, August 02, 2022

I did the work of expanding the sendemail.py program to:

Use HTML for the body of the email message (with plain text alternative)
Include an attached image (able to be used in HTML img tags)

I didn’t show a video of this because it was basically just a bunch of tedious code wrangling, but now I’m up to the point of including a zipped file attachment containing multiple items.

I’ve done the setup work for that in Jupyter and am ready to move it into the LXD Linux container.

I need to expand the sendmail.py file a little bit in order to attach the file. I can do that for the video.

Get the bit of code that’s not in the Jupyter Notebook yet and put it here.

mimecats = MIMEBase('application', 'octet-stream')
with open(Path('cats.zip'), 'br') as zfh:
    mimecats.set_payload(zfh.read())
encoders.encode_base64(mimecats)
mimecats.add_header('Content-Disposition', "attachment; filename= %s" % filename)
msgdict.attach(mimecats)

I completed this project and here is the code:

import shlex
import schedule
from time import sleep
from os import environ
from sys import stdout
from datetime import datetime
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE


pulse_count = 0

def run(command, cwd=None):
    process = Popen(
        shlex.split(command),
        stdout=PIPE,
        cwd=cwd,
        bufsize=1,
        universal_newlines=True,
        shell=False,
    )
    for line in process.stdout:
        line = line.rstrip()
        print(line)
        stdout.flush()


def hello():
    print("Hello World")


def pulse():
    global pulse_count
    pulse_count += 1
    anow = f"{pulse_count} - {datetime.now()}"
    with open('/tmp/scheduler.txt', 'a') as fh:
        print(f"{anow} is written to /tmp/scheduler.txt")
        fh.write((anow) + '\n')


def sendmail():
    print("Sending email")
    pyx = "/home/ubuntu/py310/bin/python3.10"
    cwd = "/home/ubuntu/github/scheduler/"
    cmd = f"{pyx} {cwd}sendcats.py"
    run(cmd, cwd=cwd)


print("The pulse service has started.")
schedule.every(10).seconds.do(hello)
schedule.every(5).seconds.do(pulse)
schedule.every(1).minute.do(sendmail)

while True:
    schedule.run_pending()
    sleep(1)