I need for testing purposes to populate few hundred email boxes with various messages, and was going to use smtplib for that. But among other things I need to be able to send messages not only TO specific mailboxes, but CC and BCC them as well. It does not look like smtplib supports CC-ing and BCC-ing while sending emails.
Looking for suggestions how to do CC or BCC sending messages from the python script.
(And — no, I'm not creating a script to spam anyone outside of my testing environment.)
The distinction between TO, CC and BCC occurs only in the text headers. At the SMTP level, everybody is a recipient.
TO - There is a TO: header with this recipient's address
CC - There is a CC: header with this recipient's address
BCC - This recipient isn't mentioned in the headers at all, but is still a recipient.
If you have
TO: [email protected]
CC: [email protected]
BCC: [email protected]
You have three recipients. The headers in the email body will include only the TO: and CC:
You can try MIMEText
msg = MIMEText('text')
msg['to'] =
msg['cc'] =
then send msg.as_string()
Email headers don't matter to the smtp server. Just add the CC and BCC recipients to the toaddrs when you send your email. For CC, add them to the CC header.
toaddr = '[email protected]'
cc = ['[email protected]','[email protected]']
bcc = ['[email protected]']
fromaddr = '[email protected]'
message_subject = "disturbance in sector 7"
message_text = "Three are dead in an attack in the sewers below sector 7."
message = "Subject %s\r\n" % message_subject
+"From: %s\r\n" % fromaddr
+"To: %s\r\n" % toaddr
+"CC: %s\r\n" % ",".join(cc)
+"Subject: %s\r\n" % message_subject
+"\r\n" + message_text
toaddrs = [toaddr] + cc + bcc
server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.sunnydale.k12.ca.us')
server.set_debuglevel(1)
server.sendmail(fromaddr, toaddrs, message)
server.quit()