# Sending Emails With Python

Hello there👋, have you ever wanted to automatically send emails programmatically? Today, we shall see how to achieve this in just a few lines of code.

We shall be using the SMTP protocol client to send emails to Gmail Server particularly. 

The ```smtplib``` module defines an SMTP client session object that can be used to send mail to any Internet machine with an ```SMTP``` or ```ESMTP``` listener daemon.

[Read more](https://docs.python.org/3/library/smtplib.html)

We shall also use the email module. The [email package](https://docs.python.org/3/library/email.html) is a library for managing email messages.

#### 🔸 Code
Let's begin by importing the necessary modules in a newly created ```py``` file.

```
import smtplib
from email.message import EmailMessage
``` 
Let's initialise the message object;
``` 
msg = EmailMessage()
``` 
Now let's populate our message object with the message information.
``` 
msg['From'] = "sender@gmail.com"
msg['To'] = "recipient@gmail.com"
msg['Subject'] = "Sending Emails With Python!"
message = msg.set_content("We are using Python >>")
``` 

We finally initialise our mail client;
``` 
server = smtplib.SMTP_SSL('smtp.gmail.com', 465)
server.login("yourmail@gmail.com", "yourpassword")
server.send_message(msg)
server.quit()
``` 
We start by creating our own SMTP server on port 465 and passing in real Gmail account credentials.

<mark>
Please Note: <br>
</mark>
You will need to update your Gmail account settings to enable connection and use with less secure accounts. It is a service that Google may soon deprecate or take off for security reasons.

This setting is not available for accounts with 2-Step Verification.

![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1647786622030/ChH4G9X5z.png)
Visit Account Settings [page](https://myaccount.google.com/lesssecureapps?) to get started

Let's finally add a ``` print()```  statement for a successful transaction and wrap our entire code in a function to look like this;

```
import smtplib
from email.message import EmailMessage

def send_email(send_email_to):
      msg = EmailMessage()
      
      msg['From'] = "sender@gmail.com"
      msg['To'] = send_email_to
      msg['Subject'] = "Sending Emails With Python!"
      message = msg.set_content("We are using Python >>")

      # Send the message via our own SMTP server.
      server = smtplib.SMTP_SSL('smtp.gmail.com', 465)
      server.login("yourmail@gmail.com", "yourpassword")
      server.send_message(msg)
      server.quit()

      # prints to your console
      print("Successfully sent email to %s:" % (msg['To']))
``` 
Notice, I added a ``` send_email_to```  variable that will be passed as an argument every time the ``` send_email ```  function is called.

So, if we used the real credentials and ran our file by calling the function ``` send_email("recipientmail@gmail.com")```, we would get;

![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1647787375035/CYQUwt4oL.png)
GitHub [Repo](https://github.com/Ronlin1/Python-Mail-Sender):

#### 🔸 Conclusion
Once again, hope you learned something today from my little closet.

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