CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpython-2.7emailunicode
guettli
guettli

Reputation: 27806

Send HTML Mail with Unicode

I modified the example from the python docs, to test unicode in the email module.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from __future__ import absolute_import, division, unicode_literals, print_function

import smtplib

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

# me == my email address
# you == recipient's email address
me = "[email protected]"
you = "[email protected]"

umlauts='German Umlauts: üöä ÜÖÄ ß'

# Create message container - the correct MIME type is multipart/alternative.
msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
msg['Subject'] = umlauts
msg['From'] = me
msg['To'] = you

# Create the body of the message (a plain-text and an HTML version).
text = umlauts
html = """\
<html>
  <head></head>
  <body>
    <p>Hi!<br>
       %s
    </p>
  </body>
</html>
""" % umlauts

# Record the MIME types of both parts - text/plain and text/html.
part1 = MIMEText(text, 'plain')
part2 = MIMEText(html, 'html')

# Attach parts into message container.
# According to RFC 2046, the last part of a multipart message, in this case
# the HTML message, is best and preferred.
msg.attach(part1)
msg.attach(part2)

# Send the message via local SMTP server.
s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
# sendmail function takes 3 arguments: sender's address, recipient's address
# and message to send - here it is sent as one string.
s.sendmail(me, you, msg.as_string())
s.quit()

Source: https://docs.python.org/2/library/email-examples.html#id4

I get this exception:

user@pc:~$ python src/sendhtmlmail.py 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "src/sendhtmlmail.py", line 37, in <module>
    part1 = MIMEText(text, 'plain')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/email/mime/text.py", line 30, in __init__
    self.set_payload(_text, _charset)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/email/message.py", line 226, in set_payload
    self.set_charset(charset)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/email/message.py", line 262, in set_charset
    self._payload = self._payload.encode(charset.output_charset)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 16-18: ordinal not in range(128)

How to handle unicode if you want to send a text+html mail?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 8973

Answers (2)

Daniel Roseman
Daniel Roseman

Reputation: 599490

You'll need to explicitly encode it to UTF-8.

part1 = MIMEText(text.encode('utf-8'), 'plain', 'utf-8')
part2 = MIMEText(html.encode('utf-8'), 'html', 'utf-8')

Or, avoid importing unicode_literals, and your strings will be bytes in the first place.

Upvotes: 12

Philipp Braun
Philipp Braun

Reputation: 1573

You are trying to send an email using ASCII, but instead you are passing Unicode characters to the email message.

For specifics check: https://docs.python.org/2/library/email.header.html

In terms of a coding example I will blatantly link you to the following website.

http://www.askthepony.com/blog/2011/06/how-to-send-a-proper-unicode-encoded-email-using-python-2-7/

Upvotes: 4

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