Send an Gmail/SMS message from Python

2015-08-18

Sometimes you'd like a server to notify you when its done with a job, with a minimal amount of configuration. Fortunately, Python's smtplib facilitates this.

The function below sends an email to from your Gmail account (as specified by user and pwd) to a recipient with an associated subject and body.

def send_email(user, pwd, recipient, subject, body):
    import smtplib
    gmail_user = user
    gmail_pwd  = pwd
    FROM       = user
    TO         = recipient if type(recipient) is list else [recipient]
    SUBJECT    = subject
    TEXT       = body

    # Prepare actual message
    message = """\From: %s\nTo: %s\nSubject: %s\n\n%s
    """ % (FROM, ", ".join(TO), SUBJECT, TEXT)
    try:
        server = smtplib.SMTP("smtp.gmail.com", 587)
        server.ehlo()
        server.starttls()
        server.login(gmail_user, gmail_pwd)
        server.sendmail(FROM, TO, message)
        server.close()
        print 'successfully sent the mail'
    except:
        print "failed to send mail"

You can put this in a script and have it trigger like so:

send_email("me@gmail.com","mypassword","me@gmail.com","Job XXXX is done","Done.")

You can also use it to send SMS messages to yourself, if you know your provider's SMS gateway. For instance, I use Ting for my cell service, so I can send myself SMS messages with:

send_email("me@gmail.com","mypassword","MY_NUMBER@message.ting.com","","Job XXXX is done.")

Credit: We have David Okwii's SO answer to thank for this.

Richbits