1 00:00:00,690 --> 00:00:05,640 The first thing we have to figure out is how exactly does email work? 2 00:00:06,330 --> 00:00:10,800 We all know that we can log on to Gmail or yahoo.com and we can start filling 3 00:00:10,800 --> 00:00:14,580 out an email. It's pretty much second nature to everybody by now. 4 00:00:15,180 --> 00:00:18,510 But, what actually happens behind the scenes? Well, 5 00:00:18,510 --> 00:00:20,310 let's say that we have a sender, 6 00:00:20,430 --> 00:00:25,080 angela@gmail.com and a recipient timmy@yahoo.com. 7 00:00:25,590 --> 00:00:25,860 Now, 8 00:00:25,860 --> 00:00:30,860 in order to send this email from my Gmail account to another email account, 9 00:00:31,290 --> 00:00:35,340 what happens behind the scene is that there's a Gmail mail server 10 00:00:35,790 --> 00:00:40,080 which will receive my message. And then there's a Yahoo mail server 11 00:00:40,380 --> 00:00:45,380 which will store the message until Timmy logs onto his computer and logs on to 12 00:00:46,290 --> 00:00:50,640 yahoo.com, which downloads the email from the Yahoo mail server. 13 00:00:51,660 --> 00:00:56,100 So this email is going to move between all of these steps. 14 00:00:56,610 --> 00:01:00,510 And in order to do this, it relies on something called SMTP, 15 00:01:00,960 --> 00:01:03,330 the simple mail transfer protocol. 16 00:01:04,290 --> 00:01:09,290 And this contains all of the rules that determine how an email is received by 17 00:01:09,600 --> 00:01:14,600 mail servers passed onto the next mail server and how email can be sent around 18 00:01:15,210 --> 00:01:17,550 the internet. Now, 19 00:01:17,550 --> 00:01:22,550 a good analogy for SMTP is if you imagine these mail servers as a post office 20 00:01:24,210 --> 00:01:26,790 and Timmy's computer being the mailbox. 21 00:01:27,150 --> 00:01:32,150 Then SMTP is basically the postman who knows how to handle the email and take it 22 00:01:34,290 --> 00:01:38,520 to various post offices and eventually put it into Timmy's computer. 23 00:01:39,480 --> 00:01:42,570 So in Python, there's a module called SMTP lib 24 00:01:42,960 --> 00:01:47,960 which allows us to use SMTP to send our email to any address on the internet. To 25 00:01:50,730 --> 00:01:54,660 start, I recommend setting up two fresh email accounts. Create 26 00:01:54,680 --> 00:01:56,880 a new email account with Gmail, 27 00:01:57,060 --> 00:01:59,850 and also create a new email account with Yahoo. 28 00:02:00,330 --> 00:02:04,830 These new email accounts will be perfect for testing your code and following 29 00:02:04,830 --> 00:02:07,410 along with the video tutorials, plus, 30 00:02:07,440 --> 00:02:09,360 we'll be making those email accounts a little bit 31 00:02:09,410 --> 00:02:11,600 less secure to test our code. So 32 00:02:11,630 --> 00:02:14,780 that's another reason to set up some testing email addresses for now. 33 00:02:15,710 --> 00:02:19,880 After you've set up your new email accounts, head over to the course resources and 34 00:02:19,880 --> 00:02:23,030 download the zip file with the starting code for today's lessons. 35 00:02:24,260 --> 00:02:26,660 And then we're going to open that up using PyCharm. 36 00:02:27,380 --> 00:02:30,470 Now I want you to take a look inside the starting project. 37 00:02:30,890 --> 00:02:35,750 There is a main.py file, and there's also a quotes.txt file. 38 00:02:36,140 --> 00:02:38,900 Don't worry about this files for now. We're going to come back to it 39 00:02:39,020 --> 00:02:42,110 when we explore the datetime module. For now, 40 00:02:42,140 --> 00:02:44,330 we're going to be working within the main.py. 41 00:02:44,810 --> 00:02:49,810 And I want to show you how you can use this smtplib library to start sending 42 00:02:51,230 --> 00:02:53,720 emails straight from your Python code. 43 00:02:54,710 --> 00:02:57,740 As always we import the module smtplib 44 00:02:58,220 --> 00:03:00,250 and then we start using it. 45 00:03:00,880 --> 00:03:04,360 Once we've imported this SMTP library 46 00:03:04,450 --> 00:03:09,450 essentially, we can use it to create a new SMTP object. So that we're going to 47 00:03:09,790 --> 00:03:12,190 call that object a new connection, 48 00:03:12,580 --> 00:03:16,900 because it's basically a way for us to be able to connect to our email 49 00:03:16,900 --> 00:03:19,390 provider's SMTP email server. 50 00:03:19,990 --> 00:03:24,990 We're going to do this by tapping into the smtplib and then creating a object 51 00:03:25,270 --> 00:03:29,590 from the SMTP class. Now we create this object 52 00:03:29,620 --> 00:03:34,620 one of the things that we should specify is the location of our email provider's 53 00:03:36,190 --> 00:03:39,400 SMTP server. Now for Gmail, 54 00:03:39,430 --> 00:03:42,670 it simply smtp.gmail.com, 55 00:03:43,060 --> 00:03:45,280 but it's different for every email provider. 56 00:03:45,850 --> 00:03:49,900 So that means if your email and in @gmail.com, 57 00:03:50,260 --> 00:03:55,240 then this would be how you would connect to your email server. In our case, 58 00:03:55,270 --> 00:04:00,270 I've created a testing email called appbreweryinfo@gmail.com. 59 00:04:02,170 --> 00:04:07,170 And this part that's before the outside is the identity of my email account and 60 00:04:09,580 --> 00:04:14,350 the part after the outside is the identity of my email provider. 61 00:04:14,890 --> 00:04:19,840 So in my case, I need to connect to smtp.gmail.com. 62 00:04:20,380 --> 00:04:24,790 But if you have a different email provider, for example, if you're with Hotmail, 63 00:04:24,820 --> 00:04:28,420 it's smtp.live.com. And if you're with Yahoo, 64 00:04:28,450 --> 00:04:32,680 it's smtp.mail.yahoo.com. And if you're 65 00:04:32,680 --> 00:04:37,680 with a completely different email provider then simply just Google your email 66 00:04:37,780 --> 00:04:40,360 provider and the SMTP information, 67 00:04:40,600 --> 00:04:44,860 and you should find an article somewhere that describes a URL that looks 68 00:04:44,860 --> 00:04:48,670 something like this. Once I've created my connection, 69 00:04:48,760 --> 00:04:53,760 the next thing I need to do is to go ahead and call starttls. 70 00:04:55,060 --> 00:04:58,510 Now TLS stands for transport layer security, 71 00:04:59,080 --> 00:05:03,700 and it's a way of securing our connection to all email server. 72 00:05:04,150 --> 00:05:08,560 So that way, when we're sending an email, if somebody else intercepts 73 00:05:08,590 --> 00:05:13,590 our email somewhere along the line and they try to read it, because this is 74 00:05:13,960 --> 00:05:14,793 enabled, 75 00:05:14,920 --> 00:05:18,970 that message will be encrypted and it will be impossible for them to read what 76 00:05:18,970 --> 00:05:20,710 is in the content of our email. 77 00:05:21,340 --> 00:05:25,600 So this line basically will make this connection secure. Now, 78 00:05:25,600 --> 00:05:27,640 once we've secured our connection, 79 00:05:27,670 --> 00:05:30,610 the next thing to do is to actually log in. 80 00:05:30,940 --> 00:05:32,950 So we'll call connection.login, 81 00:05:33,580 --> 00:05:38,050 and here we have to provide a username and a password. 82 00:05:38,560 --> 00:05:43,560 So the username is simply the email that we use to log on to our email service. 83 00:05:44,920 --> 00:05:45,940 So in my case, 84 00:05:45,940 --> 00:05:50,940 it's just my email, and the password I've just made up a new password 85 00:05:52,690 --> 00:05:56,830 but it's the same password that you would use to log onto your email service as 86 00:05:56,830 --> 00:06:01,160 well. So my made up password is abcd1234, 87 00:06:01,580 --> 00:06:02,720 and then two brackets. 88 00:06:03,220 --> 00:06:04,053 yeah. 89 00:06:07,180 --> 00:06:11,290 And once I've logged in to my email provider, 90 00:06:11,740 --> 00:06:15,790 the final thing I want to do is to actually send my mail. 91 00:06:16,450 --> 00:06:19,690 Now, the from address is my email 92 00:06:20,260 --> 00:06:24,490 and the to address is the person who I want to send the email to. 93 00:06:25,030 --> 00:06:30,030 So I've set up a new dummy account called appbrewerytesting@yahoo.com and make 94 00:06:33,970 --> 00:06:38,710 sure that you haven't got any typos in your email, your password, 95 00:06:38,980 --> 00:06:43,810 the SMTP URL, or the recipient email address. 96 00:06:44,560 --> 00:06:48,280 Now finally, the last thing we want to add is the message. 97 00:06:48,280 --> 00:06:51,970 So this is what we actually want to send in our email. 98 00:06:52,510 --> 00:06:56,950 And just like we did with our file when we opened it at the very end, 99 00:06:56,980 --> 00:07:00,040 once we're done with it, we're going to close it off as well. 100 00:07:00,670 --> 00:07:02,890 So now we can go ahead and hit run. 101 00:07:05,290 --> 00:07:08,230 And you might get a number of errors at this point. 102 00:07:08,710 --> 00:07:11,170 Now it's important that if you do get an error, 103 00:07:11,560 --> 00:07:16,180 then you first check to make sure that you haven't got any typos here, 104 00:07:16,510 --> 00:07:19,900 here, here, or here. 105 00:07:20,380 --> 00:07:22,180 But once you've checked that through, 106 00:07:22,300 --> 00:07:26,800 then the next thing you can do is you can actually look at this error code and 107 00:07:26,800 --> 00:07:30,010 follow the URL. Now, in our case, 108 00:07:30,100 --> 00:07:33,700 the reason is because, by default, Gmail 109 00:07:33,700 --> 00:07:37,150 doesn't just let anybody access your email account. 110 00:07:37,900 --> 00:07:42,900 And you have other ways of making your account even more secure. In order to send 111 00:07:43,810 --> 00:07:46,630 email from a Gmail account with Python 112 00:07:46,900 --> 00:07:50,800 the first thing you have to do is to lower those security boundaries. 113 00:07:51,250 --> 00:07:55,660 So head over to your username and then go to manage your Google account. 114 00:07:56,050 --> 00:07:56,740 And then here, 115 00:07:56,740 --> 00:08:00,790 you're going to go to security and you gotta to make sure that this section 116 00:08:01,090 --> 00:08:05,440 where it says 2-step verification or use your phone to sign in are both turned 117 00:08:05,500 --> 00:08:10,450 off. And then the section where it says less secure apps, 118 00:08:10,720 --> 00:08:13,180 you have to make sure this actually says on. 119 00:08:13,450 --> 00:08:17,860 So we have to turn on the access from our less secure apps, 120 00:08:18,190 --> 00:08:22,720 which is of course our Python code. At this point, 121 00:08:22,780 --> 00:08:23,950 when you look at your email, 122 00:08:23,950 --> 00:08:28,420 you'll get a critical security alert from Google telling you that access for the 123 00:08:28,420 --> 00:08:30,610 less secure apps has been turned on. 124 00:08:31,240 --> 00:08:36,240 And this is why I recommend when you're using Python code to access your email 125 00:08:36,550 --> 00:08:41,550 that you actually set up a new email address instead of using your primary email 126 00:08:42,490 --> 00:08:43,323 address. 127 00:08:43,840 --> 00:08:48,840 And that's why I've also created a new dummy account in order to actually run 128 00:08:50,380 --> 00:08:55,210 this code. Once we've done all of this, then we can go back and 129 00:08:55,410 --> 00:08:58,830 hit run again. And you'll see this time 130 00:08:58,950 --> 00:09:01,950 we see the process finished with exit code zero, 131 00:09:02,250 --> 00:09:04,920 which means all of the code ran successfully. 132 00:09:05,700 --> 00:09:08,670 And now, if I take a look at my sent box, 133 00:09:08,700 --> 00:09:11,790 you can see that I've got this message that's been sent. 134 00:09:12,300 --> 00:09:16,650 And if I take a look at the email address which the email was sent to, 135 00:09:17,070 --> 00:09:20,490 then you can see that in my inbox, there's actually nothing here. 136 00:09:20,820 --> 00:09:22,770 But if take a look inside spam, 137 00:09:23,430 --> 00:09:27,930 then there is our brilliant email that came from our Python code. 138 00:09:29,610 --> 00:09:32,970 So first thing I'm going to do is change that to not spam 139 00:09:33,000 --> 00:09:35,730 to make sure that it goes into the actual inbox. 140 00:09:36,120 --> 00:09:40,170 And the next thing we want to be able to do is how can we make our emails seem 141 00:09:40,170 --> 00:09:43,920 less like spam? So an email without a subject 142 00:09:43,920 --> 00:09:48,000 headline is prime target for being filtered as spam. 143 00:09:48,570 --> 00:09:53,160 So let's go into our email and see how we can add a subject line. 144 00:09:53,820 --> 00:09:58,050 It's pretty simple. It goes inside the message parameter. 145 00:09:58,410 --> 00:10:02,100 And all we have to do is just write the word subject: 146 00:10:02,550 --> 00:10:06,630 and then we can put in whatever it is that we want to use as the subject of the 147 00:10:06,630 --> 00:10:08,970 email like this. Now, 148 00:10:09,000 --> 00:10:12,270 how do you put in the content or the body of the email? Well, 149 00:10:12,360 --> 00:10:17,360 you add two new lines using \n\n and then you can put the 150 00:10:17,970 --> 00:10:22,560 content. This is the body of my email, 151 00:10:23,640 --> 00:10:27,120 and let's just split this up so it's a little bit easier to read 152 00:10:29,760 --> 00:10:34,320 and now I can hit run again. And once that's done, 153 00:10:34,350 --> 00:10:36,060 you can see that in my Gmail 154 00:10:36,060 --> 00:10:41,060 in the sent folder that this message now has a subject line and a body. 155 00:10:43,230 --> 00:10:46,020 And it's the same thing when I go to my 156 00:10:46,130 --> 00:10:46,963 right 157 00:10:52,220 --> 00:10:55,280 And when I take a look at this new email that came through, 158 00:10:55,310 --> 00:11:00,230 you can see the subject line and the body of the email being separated. 159 00:11:01,280 --> 00:11:06,260 Now we can actually avoid having to write this line, connection.close 160 00:11:06,590 --> 00:11:11,180 if we do the same trick as we did with file opening. We use the 161 00:11:11,180 --> 00:11:12,350 with keyword. 162 00:11:12,740 --> 00:11:17,570 So we can say that with smtplib.SMTP to create the connection 163 00:11:17,990 --> 00:11:20,630 and then we save that as the connection, 164 00:11:21,110 --> 00:11:25,490 then we can indent all of the rest of the code inside this block. 165 00:11:25,880 --> 00:11:29,420 And once it's done with sending the email, 166 00:11:29,480 --> 00:11:32,570 it will close off that connection automatically. 167 00:11:33,140 --> 00:11:37,550 So this is how you could send email using Python and smtplib. 168 00:11:37,970 --> 00:11:41,450 Now there's quite a few things here that are prone to errors, 169 00:11:42,020 --> 00:11:45,920 especially given that we're typing a lot of things in plain text, 170 00:11:46,220 --> 00:11:50,420 like our email, our password and a bunch of things. 171 00:11:50,480 --> 00:11:54,130 So if you are getting errors when you're running your code 172 00:11:54,340 --> 00:11:59,260 or if it's not doing what you expect it to, make sure that you've checked against 173 00:11:59,290 --> 00:12:03,730 all of these strings, and it's actually what you expected it to be. 174 00:12:04,240 --> 00:12:08,410 Secondly, make sure that whichever account you're sending from that 175 00:12:08,410 --> 00:12:13,030 you actually go ahead into the account and modify the security settings. 176 00:12:13,510 --> 00:12:18,130 For example, let's say I wanted to send from this email address, 177 00:12:18,190 --> 00:12:22,120 so I'm going to put that in here. And then in this case, 178 00:12:22,150 --> 00:12:26,020 the email server I need to connect to will be Yahoo's email server, 179 00:12:26,380 --> 00:12:29,740 which is under the URL that I showed you before, 180 00:12:30,010 --> 00:12:35,010 smtp.mail.yahoo.com. 181 00:12:36,280 --> 00:12:40,810 And that is actually not enough. So let me just change my recipient. 182 00:12:43,950 --> 00:12:44,550 All right. 183 00:12:44,550 --> 00:12:49,110 And I hit run. This is the error that you'll see. It says, 184 00:12:49,110 --> 00:12:53,370 SMTP server disconnected, connection unexpectedly closed. 185 00:12:53,700 --> 00:12:57,120 Now this could be down to a number of reasons, for example, 186 00:12:57,150 --> 00:12:59,730 a typo in this part, 187 00:13:00,210 --> 00:13:04,590 but also if your account doesn't actually allow less secure apps. 188 00:13:04,950 --> 00:13:07,590 So on Yahoo, the process is a little bit different. 189 00:13:07,650 --> 00:13:09,330 You have to go into your account, 190 00:13:09,630 --> 00:13:13,170 go to account info and then go to our account security. 191 00:13:14,850 --> 00:13:16,980 And you'll have to log in again 192 00:13:19,860 --> 00:13:22,920 and generate a new app password. 193 00:13:23,520 --> 00:13:27,420 So we're going to create a new app and we're going to give it a custom name, 194 00:13:27,900 --> 00:13:30,990 Python code, and then click generate. 195 00:13:31,170 --> 00:13:36,170 And now we have a app password to use for our Python code. 196 00:13:37,170 --> 00:13:41,430 So now back over here, we change this password to 197 00:13:41,430 --> 00:13:45,960 the one that we just copied over. And now if I hit run, 198 00:13:46,200 --> 00:13:50,370 that error should go away and we should get process finished with exit code 199 00:13:50,370 --> 00:13:54,600 zero. And when I take a look over here in my inbox, 200 00:13:57,540 --> 00:14:01,320 I've got my email from appbrewerytesting@yahoo.com. 201 00:14:03,360 --> 00:14:05,550 So check your security settings, 202 00:14:05,610 --> 00:14:10,140 check your spam and check that you haven't made any typos. 203 00:14:11,250 --> 00:14:12,600 And if none of that works, 204 00:14:12,990 --> 00:14:15,780 then just simply try doing everything I did in the video 205 00:14:16,080 --> 00:14:20,550 but with a new email account that you set up with Gmail. 206 00:14:21,150 --> 00:14:25,800 Then you can use the same SMTP address and the same process that you saw in the 207 00:14:25,800 --> 00:14:27,210 video to try this out.