Quickstart

Getting start with auto-emailer is easy, but requires a few simple steps.

The examples in this Quickstart guide will use the Gmail SMTP server to send emails, but the same principles apply to other email services. Although the majority of email providers use the same connection ports as the ones in this tutorial, you can run a quick Google search to confirm yours.

Setting up an Email

Before you use auto-emailer, you’ll need to have an email provider. To get started with this tutorial, I’ll walk you through setting up a Gmail account. A nice feature of Gmail is that you can use the + sign to add any modifiers to your email address, right before the @ sign. For example, mail sent to testautoemailer+test1@gmail.com and testautoemailer+test2@gmail.com will both arrive at testautoemailer@gmail.com. When testing email functionality, you can use this to emulate multiple addresses that all point to the same inbox.

To set up a Gmail address for testing your code, do the following:

Create a new Google account

First step is to open a web browser and create a new gmail account.

Account Settings

Once you have created an account, navigate to the account settings page by clicking the circle logo in the upper right corner.

Account Security

Inside of the account settings page, click on the Security section located on the left menu.

Less Secure Apps

In the account security page, scroll down until you see “Less secure app access” box. Click on the link Turn on access (not recommended).

Turn Allow less secure apps to ON. Be aware that this makes it easier for others to gain access to your account.

If you don’t want to lower the security settings of your Gmail account, check out Google’s documentation on how to gain access credentials for your Python script, using the OAuth2 authorization framework.

Installation

Install the latest auto-emailer release via pip:

pip install auto-emailer

You may also install a specific version:

pip install auto-emailer==1.0.0

Note

The latest development version can always be found on GitHub.

Credentials

To get started either explicitly pass arguments to Credentials to authenticate your SMTP client or you can set the environment variables EMAILER_SENDER AND EMAIL_PASSWORD for auto configuration. In most cases, these two environment variables will be enough, but if authentication is failing then you may need to further specify the environment variables EMAILER_HOST and EMAILER_PORT.

This library provides no support for obtaining user credentials, but does provide support for using user credentials. This way you don’t have to worry about accidentally pushing sensitive credentials to a place such as GitHub and you can easily and securely authenticate the SMTP client within your code. The auto-emailer environment variables all start with EMAILER_.

Using auto-emailer

To use auto-emailer, you must first import it:

from auto_emailer import Emailer, Message

# auto-configuration of credentials to
# authenticate smtp server
mailer = Emailer(config=None, delay_login=False)

Now that you have an emailer client, you can create a message object to send from the client. The following uses the Message class to create an email message:

# create a message
my_email = Message('my_email@test.com',
                   ['my_friend@gmail.com'],
                   'Hello Friend!')

It’s easy to draft an email message once you have an instance of the Message class. For example, the following creates the text of an email message and then send the email:

# draft a message
my_email = my_email.draft_message(text="Hi! Let's hang out 😁")

# send email message to friend!
mailer.send_email(my_email)

Tips and Tricks

• Reference the email provider (host) for more information on bandwidth limits for accounts.
• Reference the email provider (host) for more information on sending limits.
• Do not send too fast.
• Do not send more than 50 emails at once or use time.sleep() in between each email.
• Do not try stupid things or your email provider will punish you.