Sending a properly encoded email that contains non-ASCII characters is not as trivial as it should be. Here's more or less what I want:
sender = u'Sender \u263A <sender@example.com>' recipient = u'Recipient \u263B <recipient@example.com>' subject = u'Smile! \u263A' body = u'Smile!\n\u263B' send_email(sender, recipient, subject, body)
The hard part is getting all the unicode strings to be properly encoded in the email. Details like multiple recipients, additional headers, attachments, SMTP configuration and error handling are ignored for the purposes of this article.
Here's the solution:
from smtplib import SMTP
from email.MIMEText import MIMEText
from email.Header import Header
from email.Utils import parseaddr, formataddr
def send_email(sender, recipient, subject, body):
"""Send an email.
All arguments should be Unicode strings (plain ASCII works as well).
Only the real name part of sender and recipient addresses may contain
non-ASCII characters.
The email will be properly MIME encoded and delivered though SMTP to
localhost port 25. This is easy to change if you want something different.
The charset of the email will be the first one out of US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1
and UTF-8 that can represent all the characters occurring in the email.
"""
header_charset = 'ISO-8859-1'
for body_charset in 'US-ASCII', 'ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8':
try:
body.encode(body_charset)
except UnicodeError:
pass
else:
break
sender_name, sender_addr = parseaddr(sender)
recipient_name, recipient_addr = parseaddr(recipient)
sender_name = str(Header(unicode(sender_name), header_charset))
recipient_name = str(Header(unicode(recipient_name), header_charset))
sender_addr = sender_addr.encode('ascii')
recipient_addr = recipient_addr.encode('ascii')
msg = MIMEText(body.encode(body_charset), 'plain', body_charset)
msg['From'] = formataddr((sender_name, sender_addr))
msg['To'] = formataddr((recipient_name, recipient_addr))
msg['Subject'] = Header(unicode(subject), header_charset)
smtp = SMTP("localhost")
smtp.sendmail(sender, recipient, msg.as_string())
smtp.quit()
I wish I could write it like this:
from smtplib import SMTP
from email.MIMEText import MIMEText
def send_email(sender, recipient, subject, body):
"""Science-fictional simple version of send_email."""
msg = MIMEText(body)
msg['From'] = sender
msg['To'] = recipient
msg['Subject'] = subject
smtp = SMTP("localhost")
smtp.sendmail(sender, recipient, msg.as_string())
smtp.quit()
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