Email with Python!

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We created this workshop to show how to send emails using python. There are many ways to do this from the default python SMTP (email server) library to SendGrid by Twilio. For this workshop, we will be using SendGrid. SendGrid is an online API provided by Twilio that allows us to send emails with ease and less code. Check out the instructions below!

Python Emailer

using an online IDE REPL.it

API

What is an API?

An API (Application programming interface) is a computer science term describing something a program uses to interact with another programming service, for example, informational services like dictionaries, or connecting and using servers.

Read more about APIs!

Today's workshop uses an API created by Twilio called Send Grid. It uses an API key to allow access for a user to send an email. It takes inputs for who your sending to, who is sending (doesn't have to be an email), the subject, an html body.

Repl.it

Create a new repl and choose python. Make sure its specified as Python or Python 3. Do Not Use Python 2

repl it image

Creating the program

Imports

We start by importing the needed code from the sendgrid library.

from sendgrid import SendGridAPIClient
from sendgrid.helpers.mail import Mail

Configuring the email

Input all the values needed for sending the email and with the messages you want.

message = Mail(
    from_email='[email protected]',
    to_emails='[email protected]',
    subject='Sending with Twilio SendGrid is Fun',
    html_content='<strong>and easy to do anywhere, even with Python</strong>')

Completeing the code

We will display and give out an API key to use for your program.
We use try and except to catch possible errors when sending your email.

try:
    sg = SendGridAPIClient(APIKEY))
    response = sg.send(message)
    print(response.status_code)
    print(response.body)
    print(response.headers)
except Exception as e:
    print(e.message)

Advanced steps

We can create a variable to store html code to send through an email.

htmlContent = '''
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
.coolclass {
  color: rgb(255, 175, 175);
}
.smallText {
  color: #ddd
  font-size: 7px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello There.</h1>

<p class="coolclass">Welcome to my html file</p>

<p>Thanks<br>-Lowell Dev Club</p>
<p class="smallText>Sent using python!</p>
<a href="https://www.lowelldev.club/">Our website!</a>
</body>
</html>
'''

Then we replace this part of the code to send our new html.

message = Mail(
    from_email='[email protected]',
    to_emails='[email protected]',
    subject='Sending with Twilio SendGrid is Fun',
    html_content=htmlContent)

You can now customize your html email messages with css styling and html elements!

View the code file here
Check out a functioning program here

Workshop Repo