Send email programmatically using python SMTP for free

Sending an email will be a useful feature in any of the applications. In this article, I am going to show you how to send email using your Gmail account programmatically for free with the help of python.

Gmail configurations
Saving credentials in environment variables
Python code

Gmail configurations

There are two ways to get the credentials for sending mail.

1. Two-factor authentication (RECOMMENDED)

Add two-factor authentication to your google account.
1. Go to the following link – https://myaccount.google.com
2. Find and click “security” in the left hand side menu bar
3. signing in to Google again
4. Enter your mobile number and activate the 2-step verification.
Come back to the security page under signing in to Google.
1. Now click the app password and go to “select app”.
2. Click Custom name (give any name)
3. Copy the generated password and keep it safe since it can be viewed only once.

2. Local machine testing (NOT SECURE)

Go to the following link and enable less secure app – https://myaccount.google.com/lesssecureapps
If ip keeps changing then use following link, https://accounts.google.com/DisplayUnlockCaptcha

Saving credentials in environment variables

NOTE: You can neglect this step if you are doing this for testing purposes and hard coding the credential is acceptable.

Click on start, and search environment variables and select edit environment variables for your account.
Click on environment variables under the advanced tab.

Under system variables, click the “New” button.

Under variable name, enter “EMAIL” and under variable value, enter the email id that you configured and click OK.

Similarly, click New again, and enter “PASSWORD” under the variable name and your generated password under the variable value and click ok.

Python code

The following code can be found in my repository – https://github.com/ranjithkumarmadhavan/python-projects/tree/main/email%20automation

import smtplib

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart

from email.mime.text import MIMEText

import os

from_address = os.environ[‘EMAIL’]

to_address = [“TO_EMAIL_ADDRESS”] #add the email id to which you want to send mail

message = MIMEMultipart()

message[‘From’] = from_address

message[‘To’] = ” ,”.join(to_address)

message[‘subject’] = ‘Hello from SMTP’

body = “Hello from Python code”

message.attach(MIMEText(body,’plain’))

email = os.environ[‘EMAIL’] #picks from the environment variables we configured above

password = os.environ[‘PASSWORD’] #picks from the environment variables we configured above

mail = smtplib.SMTP(‘smtp.gmail.com’,587)

mail.ehlo()

mail.starttls()

mail.ehlo()

mail.login(email,password)

text = message.as_string()

mail.sendmail(from_address,to_address,text)

mail.quit()

Conclusion

I have used this specific code many times in my AWS lambda code. Configuring the lambda function with a cron expression to execute on a regular interval can be a very good use case.

Happy Programming!!