Receive and send emails in python

Question

How can i receive and send email in python? A 'mail server' of sorts.

I am looking into making an app that listens to see if it recieves an email addressed to [email protected], and sends an email to the sender.

Now, am i able to do this all in python, would it be best to use 3rd party libraries?

Answer 1

Yes, you can do pretty much everything with the built-in libraries. Do a search here looking for the tags [python] and [email] and you'll see how it's done.

Answer 2

poplib and smtplib will be your friends when developing your app.

Answer 3

Zed's Son of Sam may be of interest as well.

Answer 4

Python has an SMTPD module that will be helpful to you for writing a server. You'll probably also want the SMTP module to do the re-send. Both modules are in the standard library at least since version 2.3.

Answer 5

Here is a very simple example:

import smtplib

server = 'mail.server.com'
user = ''
password = ''

recipients = ['[email protected]', '[email protected]']
sender = '[email protected]'
message = 'Hello World'

session = smtplib.SMTP(server)
# if your SMTP server doesn't need authentications,
# you don't need the following line:
session.login(user, password)
session.sendmail(sender, recipients, message)

For more options, error handling, etc, look at the smtplib module documentation.

Answer 6

Depending on the amount of mail you are sending you might want to look into using a real mail server like postifx or sendmail (*nix systems) Both of those programs have the ability to send a received mail to a program based on the email address.

Answer 7

The sending part has been covered, for the receiving you can use pop or imap

Answer 8

I do not think it would be a good idea to write a real mail server in Python. This is certainly possible (see mcrute's and Manuel Ceron's posts to have details) but it is a lot of work when you think of everything that a real mail server must handle (queuing, retransmission, dealing with spam, etc).

You should explain in more detail what you need. If you just want to react to incoming email, I would suggest to configure the mail server to call a program when it receives the email. This program could do what it wants (updating a database, creating a file, talking to another Python program).

To call an arbitrary program from the mail server, you have several choices:

1. For sendmail and Postfix, a ~/.forward containing "|/path/to/program"
2. If you use procmail, a recipe action of |path/to/program
3. And certainly many others