Sending email with Python and Gmail SMTP server doesn't work with attachment

Question

I'm trying send email with a PDF attached. I have defined the next function:

def mail(to, subject, text, attach):
    gmail_user = "[email protected]"
    gmail_name = "name <[email protected]>"
    gmail_pwd = "password"

    msg = MIMEMultipart()

    msg['From'] = gmail_name
    msg['To'] = to
    msg['Subject'] = subject

    msg.attach(MIMEText(text))

    part = MIMEBase('application', 'octet-stream')
    part.set_payload(open(attach, 'rb').read())
    Encoders.encode_base64(part)
    part.add_header('Content-Disposition',
           'attachment; filename="%s"' % os.path.basename(attach))
    msg.attach(part)

    mailServer = smtplib.SMTP("smtp.gmail.com", 587)

    mailServer.ehlo()
    mailServer.starttls()
    mailServer.ehlo()
    mailServer.login(gmail_user, gmail_pwd)
    mailServer.sendmail(gmail_name, to, msg.as_string())
    mailServer.close()

The problem is that the console shows the following error

smtplib.SMTPServerDisconnected: Server not connected

However, if I simply replace 'msg.as_string' with "Whatever string" it works fine. So I think that this issue happens when I try attach a PDF file.

Could you help me please ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Try this-

import smtplib
import mimetypes
from email.MIMEMultipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.MIMEBase import MIMEBase
from email.MIMEText import MIMEText
from email.Utils import COMMASPACE, formatdate
from email import Encoders


filePath = "fileName.pdf"

From = '[email protected]'
To = '[email protected]'

msg = MIMEMultipart()
msg['From'] = From
msg['To'] = To
msg['Date'] = formatdate(localtime=True)
msg['Subject'] = 'Sample subject'

msg.attach(MIMEText('Sample message'))

try:
    smtp = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com:587')
    smtp.starttls()
    smtp.login('[email protected]', '123456')
except:
    i = 1
else:
    i = 0

if i == 0:
    ctype, encoding = mimetypes.guess_type(filePath)
    if ctype is None or encoding is not None:
        # No guess could be made, or the file is encoded (compressed), so
        # use a generic bag-of-bits type.
        ctype = 'application/octet-stream'
    maintype, subtype = ctype.split('/', 1)
    if maintype == 'text':
        fp = open(filePath)
        # Note: we should handle calculating the charset
        part = MIMEText(fp.read(), _subtype=subtype)
        fp.close()
    elif maintype == 'image':
        fp = open(filePath, 'rb')
        part = MIMEImage(fp.read(), _subtype=subtype)
        fp.close()
    elif maintype == 'audio':
        fp = open(filePath, 'rb')
        part = MIMEAudio(fp.read(), _subtype=subtype)
        fp.close()
    else:
        fp = open(filePath, 'rb')
        part = MIMEBase(maintype, subtype)
        part.set_payload(fp.read())
        fp.close()
        # Encode the payload using Base64
        Encoders.encode_base64(part)
    part.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment; filename="%s"' % filePath)
    msg.attach(part)
    try:
        smtp.sendmail(From, To, msg.as_string())
    except:
        print "Mail not sent"
    else:
        print "Mail sent"
    smtp.close()
else:
    print "Connection failed"

Adapted from: https://docs.python.org/2/library/email-examples.html