Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By : Alessandro Molina
Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By: Alessandro Molina

Overview of this book

The Python 3 Standard Library is a vast array of modules that you can use for developing various kinds of applications. It contains an exhaustive list of libraries, and this book will help you choose the best one to address specific programming problems in Python. The Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook begins with recipes on containers and data structures and guides you in performing effective text management in Python. You will find Python recipes for command-line operations, networking, filesystems and directories, and concurrent execution. You will learn about Python security essentials in Python and get to grips with various development tools for debugging, benchmarking, inspection, error reporting, and tracing. The book includes recipes to help you create graphical user interfaces for your application. You will learn to work with multimedia components and perform mathematical operations on date and time. The recipes will also show you how to deploy different searching and sorting algorithms on your data. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills needed to write clean code in Python and develop applications that meet your needs.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Sending emails


Emails are the most widespread communication tool nowadays, if you're on the internet, it's pretty much granted you have an email address and they are now highly integrated in smartphones too, so are accessible on the go.

For all those reasons, emails are the preferred tools for sending notifications to users, reports of completion, and results of long-running processes.

Sending emails requires some machinery and both the SMTP and MIME protocols are quite articulated if you want to support them by yourself.

Luckily, the Python standard library comes with built-in support for both and we can rely on the smtplib module to interact with the SMTP server to send our email and on email package to actually create the content of the email and tackle all the special formats and encoding required.

How to do it...

Sending an email is a three-step process:

  1. Contact the SMTP server and authenticate to it
  2. Prepare the email itself
  3. Provide the email to the SMTP server

All three phases are covered in...