How to unpack values into message text using smtplib?

Question

I'm feeding a list of tuples that contain results from a sql query into my email. I want to be able to format the email to print out the lines in the msg list in the following format:

SUBJECT LINE: xxxxx
File name: 'Blah Blah Blah' Sent to Pivot at: '3:30 p.m.'
File name: 'Blah Blah Blah' Sent to Pivot at: '3:30 p.m.'
File name: 'Blah Blah Blah' Sent to Pivot at: '3:30 p.m.'
File name: 'Blah Blah Blah' Sent to Pivot at: '3:30 p.m.'
File name: 'Blah Blah Blah' Sent to Pivot at: '3:30 p.m.'

Here is the code:

def send_email(recipient_list, missing_list):
    msg = ['File name: {0} '
           'Sent to Pivot at: {1}\n'.format(element[1],
                                            element[2]) for element in missing_list]
    msg['Subject'] = 'Alert!! Handshake files missing!'
    msg['From'] = r'm****@r**.com'
    msg['To'] = recipient_list

    s = smtplib.SMTP(r'mail.r**.com')
    s.sendmail(msg['From'], msg['To'], msg)
    s.quit()

My input will be in the form of a list of tuples containing three items, [(id, file_name, timestamp)]

Answer 1

It seems like you're missing the knowledge of some basic data structures in Python.

This is pretty close:

msg = ['File name: {0} '
       'Sent to Pivot at: {1}'.format(element[1],
                                      element[2]) for element in missing_list]

But you'll want to join it together in a single string. Perhaps something like this:

body = '\n'.join(msg)

I'm not sure what else you're trying to do with msg. You've created it as a list, but then are trying to assign values to keys as though it were a dict. Why not just use local variables such as subject, and from?

It seems that from the smtplib examples that you'll also need to include From: and To: in the body of the email. Look at this example for a bit higher level abstraction of how to do that with smtplib.

I know I haven't completely re-written your code into a working version here, but hopefully this at least gets you closer.