e-mail automation using python

Question

I use an automation of sending e-mails using python, the problem is that sometimes the code works and sometimes it doesn't.

In the code python basically takes my contacts from the txt and then my e-mail message in another txt and sends the message from my txt of messages to the contacts stored in my contact.txt.

When the problem is most of the time when I update mycontacts.txt and the error that appears is:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "c:/emailbot/botmessav1.py", line 70, in <module>
    main()
  File "c:/emailbot/botmessav1.py", line 36, in main
    names, emails = get_contacts('mycontacts.txt') # read contacts
  File "c:/emailbot/botmessav1.py", line 21, in get_contacts
    names.append(a_contact.split()[0])
IndexError: list index out of range  ```

The following is an example of the contact list, mycontacts.txt:

marina [email protected]
luis [email protected]
carlos [email protected]
marcelo [email protected]

And this is the code I'm using:

import smtplib

from string import Template

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

MY_ADDRESS = 'e-mail'
PASSWORD = 'password'

def get_contacts(mycontacts):
    """
    Return two lists names, emails containing names and email addresses
    read from a file specified by filename.
    """
    
    names = []
    emails = []
    with open(mycontacts, mode='r', encoding='utf-8') as contacts_file:
        for a_contact in contacts_file:
            names.append(a_contact.split()[0])
            emails.append(a_contact.split()[1])
    return names, emails

def read_template(message):
    """
    Returns a Template object comprising the contents of the 
    file specified by filename.
    """
    
    with open(message, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as template_file:
        template_file_content = template_file.read()
    return Template(template_file_content)

def main():
    names, emails = get_contacts('mycontacts.txt') # read contacts
    message_template = read_template('message.txt')

    # set up the SMTP server
    s = smtplib.SMTP(host='smtp.gmail.com', port=587)
    s.starttls()
    s.login(MY_ADDRESS, PASSWORD)

    # For each contact, send the email:
    for name, email in zip(names, emails):
        msg = MIMEMultipart()       # create a message

        # add in the actual person name to the message template
        message = message_template.substitute(PERSON_NAME=name.title())

        # Prints out the message body for our sake
        print(message)

        # setup the parameters of the message
        msg['From']=MY_ADDRESS
        msg['To']=email
        msg['Subject']="Subject"
        
        # add in the message body
        msg.attach(MIMEText(message, 'plain'))
        
        # send the message via the server set up earlier.
        s.send_message(msg)
        del msg
        
    # Terminate the SMTP session and close the connection
    s.quit()
    
if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Answer 1

You should not have any empty lines in contacts.txt file

marina [email protected]
luis [email protected]
carlos [email protected]
marcelo [email protected]