WEBVTT 0 00:00.690 --> 00:01.800 The first thing we have 1 00:01.800 --> 00:06.390 to figure out is how exactly does email work? 2 00:06.390 --> 00:08.340 We all know that we can log onto Gmail 3 00:08.340 --> 00:11.970 or yahoo.com and we can start filling out an email. 4 00:11.970 --> 00:15.240 It's pretty much second nature to everybody by now. 5 00:15.240 --> 00:18.240 But what actually happens behind the scenes? 6 00:18.240 --> 00:20.430 Well, let's say that we have a sender, 7 00:20.430 --> 00:25.430 angela@gmail.com and a recipient, timmy@yahoo.com. 8 00:25.650 --> 00:28.980 Now, in order to send this email from my Gmail account 9 00:28.980 --> 00:33.300 to another email account, what happens behind the scene is 10 00:33.300 --> 00:35.790 that there's a Gmail mail server, 11 00:35.790 --> 00:37.980 which will receive my message. 12 00:37.980 --> 00:40.380 And then there's a Yahoo Mail server, 13 00:40.380 --> 00:43.770 which will store the message until Timmy logs 14 00:43.770 --> 00:47.670 onto his computer and logs onto yahoo.com, 15 00:47.670 --> 00:50.823 which downloads the email from the Yahoo Mail server. 16 00:51.690 --> 00:56.329 So this email is going to move between all of these steps. 17 00:56.329 --> 00:58.080 And in order to do this, 18 00:58.080 --> 01:00.990 it relies on something called SMTP, 19 01:00.990 --> 01:03.726 the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. 20 01:03.726 --> 01:07.530 And this contains all of the rules that determine 21 01:07.530 --> 01:11.160 how an email is received by mail servers passed 22 01:11.160 --> 01:12.930 onto the next mail server 23 01:12.930 --> 01:15.993 and how email can be sent around the Internet. 24 01:17.340 --> 01:19.683 Now, a good analogy for SMTP is 25 01:19.683 --> 01:24.240 if you imagine these mail servers as a post office 26 01:24.240 --> 01:27.210 and Timmy's computer being the mailbox. 27 01:27.210 --> 01:32.210 Then SMTP is basically the postman who knows how to handle 28 01:32.220 --> 01:36.120 the email and take it to various post offices 29 01:36.120 --> 01:39.510 and eventually put it into Timmy's computer. 30 01:39.510 --> 01:42.990 So in Python there's a module called smtplib, 31 01:42.990 --> 01:47.460 which allows us to use SMTP to send our email 32 01:47.460 --> 01:50.550 to any address on the Internet. 33 01:50.550 --> 01:54.360 To start, I recommend setting up two fresh email accounts. 34 01:54.360 --> 01:57.060 Create a new email account with Gmail 35 01:57.060 --> 02:00.360 and also create a new email account with Yahoo. 36 02:00.360 --> 02:03.000 These new email accounts will be perfect 37 02:03.000 --> 02:04.260 for testing your code 38 02:04.260 --> 02:06.930 and following along with the video tutorials. 39 02:06.930 --> 02:09.000 Plus, we'll be making those email accounts 40 02:09.000 --> 02:11.490 a little bit less secure to test our code. 41 02:11.490 --> 02:12.900 So that's another reason to set up 42 02:12.900 --> 02:15.750 some testing email addresses for now. 43 02:15.750 --> 02:18.150 After you've set up your new email accounts, 44 02:18.150 --> 02:21.150 head over to the Course Resources and download the zip file 45 02:21.150 --> 02:23.300 with the starting code for today's lessons. 46 02:24.270 --> 02:27.390 And then we're going to open that up using PyCharm. 47 02:27.390 --> 02:30.582 Now I want you to take a look inside the starting project. 48 02:30.582 --> 02:33.150 There is a main.py file 49 02:33.150 --> 02:36.180 and there's also a quotes.txt file. 50 02:36.180 --> 02:37.710 Don't worry about this file for now, 51 02:37.710 --> 02:39.060 we're going to come back to it 52 02:39.060 --> 02:41.640 when we explore the datetime module. 53 02:41.640 --> 02:44.850 For now, we're going to be working within the main.py. 54 02:44.850 --> 02:49.481 And I want to show you how you can use this smtplib library 55 02:49.481 --> 02:54.377 to start sending emails straight from your Python code. 56 02:54.377 --> 02:58.290 As always, we import the module smtplib 57 02:58.290 --> 03:00.930 and then we can start using it. 58 03:00.930 --> 03:05.095 Once we've imported this SMTP library essentially, 59 03:05.095 --> 03:09.330 we can use it to create a new SMTP object. 60 03:09.330 --> 03:12.600 So we're going to call that object a new connection 61 03:12.600 --> 03:15.000 because it's basically a way for us to be able 62 03:15.000 --> 03:20.000 to connect to our email provider's SMTP email server. 63 03:20.010 --> 03:23.130 We're going to do this by tapping into the smtplib 64 03:23.130 --> 03:27.810 and then creating an object from the SMTP class. 65 03:27.810 --> 03:29.670 Now, when we create this object, 66 03:29.670 --> 03:33.759 one of the things that we should specify is the location 67 03:33.759 --> 03:37.648 of our email providers SMTP server. 68 03:37.648 --> 03:42.648 Now for Gmail, it's simply smtp.gmail.com, 69 03:43.140 --> 03:45.870 but it's different for every email provider. 70 03:45.870 --> 03:50.310 So that means if your email ends in @gmail.com, 71 03:50.310 --> 03:52.620 then this would be how you would connect 72 03:52.620 --> 03:54.450 to your email server. 73 03:54.450 --> 03:56.010 In our case, I've created 74 03:56.010 --> 04:01.010 a testing email called appbreweryinfo@gmail.com. 75 04:02.160 --> 04:06.000 And this part that's before the @ sign is 76 04:06.000 --> 04:09.390 the identity of my email account. 77 04:09.390 --> 04:11.850 And the part after the @ sign is 78 04:11.850 --> 04:14.910 the identity of my email provider. 79 04:14.910 --> 04:19.659 So in my case, I need to connect to smtp.gmail.com. 80 04:19.659 --> 04:23.160 But if you have a different email provider, 81 04:23.160 --> 04:27.240 for example if you're with Hotmail, it's smtp.live.com, 82 04:27.240 --> 04:32.190 and if you are with Yahoo, it's smtp.mail.yahoo.com. 83 04:32.190 --> 04:35.190 And if you're with a completely different email provider 84 04:35.190 --> 04:38.670 than simply just Google your email provider 85 04:38.670 --> 04:40.590 and the SMTP information, 86 04:40.590 --> 04:42.660 and you should find an article somewhere 87 04:42.660 --> 04:46.162 that describes a URL that looks something like this. 88 04:46.162 --> 04:48.780 Once I've created my connection, 89 04:48.780 --> 04:52.110 the next thing I need to do is to go ahead 90 04:52.110 --> 04:55.080 and call starttls(). 91 04:55.080 --> 04:59.100 Now, TLS stands for Transport Layer Security, 92 04:59.100 --> 05:00.815 and it's a way of securing 93 05:00.815 --> 05:04.170 our connection to our email server. 94 05:04.170 --> 05:06.810 So that way when we're sending an email, 95 05:06.810 --> 05:09.420 if somebody else intercepts our email 96 05:09.420 --> 05:12.720 somewhere along the line and they try to read it, 97 05:12.720 --> 05:16.383 because this is enabled that message will be encrypted 98 05:16.383 --> 05:18.720 and it'll be impossible for them to read 99 05:18.720 --> 05:21.360 what is in the content of our email. 100 05:21.360 --> 05:24.620 So this line basically will make this connection secure. 101 05:24.620 --> 05:27.720 Now, once we've secured our connection, 102 05:27.720 --> 05:30.990 the next thing to do is to actually log in. 103 05:30.990 --> 05:33.249 So we'll call connection.login() 104 05:33.249 --> 05:38.223 and here we have to provide a username and a password. 105 05:38.223 --> 05:41.460 So the username is simply the email 106 05:41.460 --> 05:44.940 that we use to log on to our email service. 107 05:44.940 --> 05:49.560 So in my case, it's just my_email and the password, 108 05:49.560 --> 05:52.497 I've just made up a new password. 109 05:52.497 --> 05:57.497 So my made-up password is ABCD1234 and then two brackets. 110 06:02.760 --> 06:07.260 And once I've logged in to my email provider, 111 06:07.260 --> 06:11.970 the final thing I want to do is to actually send my mail. 112 06:11.970 --> 06:15.120 Now the from address is my_email 113 06:15.120 --> 06:18.270 and the to address is the person 114 06:18.270 --> 06:20.550 who I want to send the email to. 115 06:20.550 --> 06:21.383 So I've set up 116 06:21.383 --> 06:25.227 a new dummy account called appbrewerytesting@yahoo.com. 117 06:28.500 --> 06:33.150 And make sure that you haven't got any typos in your email, 118 06:33.150 --> 06:38.150 your password, the SMTP URL or the recipient email address. 119 06:40.080 --> 06:43.830 Now finally, the last thing we want to add is the message. 120 06:43.830 --> 06:47.970 So this is what we actually want to send in our email. 121 06:47.970 --> 06:50.580 And just like we did with our file 122 06:50.580 --> 06:53.820 when we opened it at the very end, once we're done with it 123 06:53.820 --> 06:56.190 we're going to close it off as well. 124 06:56.190 --> 06:58.563 So now we can go ahead and hit Run. 125 07:00.127 --> 07:04.230 And you might get a number of errors at this point. 126 07:04.230 --> 07:06.644 Now it's important that if you do get an error, 127 07:06.644 --> 07:10.200 then you first check to make sure that you haven't got 128 07:10.200 --> 07:15.200 any typos here, here, here, or here. 129 07:15.870 --> 07:18.720 But once you've checked that through, then the next thing 130 07:18.720 --> 07:21.614 you can do is you can actually look at this error code 131 07:21.614 --> 07:24.210 and follow the URL. 132 07:24.210 --> 07:28.920 Now in our case, the reason is because by default, 133 07:28.920 --> 07:33.420 Gmail doesn't just let anybody access your email account. 134 07:33.420 --> 07:35.760 And you have other ways of making 135 07:35.760 --> 07:38.340 your account even more secure. 136 07:38.340 --> 07:42.420 In order to send email from a Gmail account with Python, 137 07:42.420 --> 07:44.310 the first thing you have to do is create 138 07:44.310 --> 07:47.010 a special password for your application. 139 07:47.010 --> 07:50.940 This means you have to go to the security settings 140 07:50.940 --> 07:53.010 for your Google account. 141 07:53.010 --> 07:54.540 So if you're inside Gmail, 142 07:54.540 --> 07:57.810 go ahead and click on your profile, 143 07:57.810 --> 08:02.363 go to Manage your Google account, and then go to Security. 144 08:02.363 --> 08:04.920 Now while you're here you first have 145 08:04.920 --> 08:07.083 to turn on 2-Step Verification. 146 08:13.470 --> 08:16.050 Once you've confirmed using your phone, 147 08:16.050 --> 08:19.030 go ahead and turn on 2-Step Verification 148 08:20.250 --> 08:24.330 and then go back to the Security page. 149 08:24.330 --> 08:25.830 And now you should be able to see 150 08:25.830 --> 08:28.800 this section, App passwords show up. 151 08:28.800 --> 08:32.130 Go ahead and click on it and enter your password 152 08:32.130 --> 08:33.630 for your Google account again. 153 08:35.073 --> 08:38.160 (rapid typing) 154 08:38.160 --> 08:42.627 And then go ahead and create a Other type of app. 155 08:42.627 --> 08:47.627 And we'll name it birthday_wisher and click GENERATE. 156 08:49.920 --> 08:52.020 Now here's the really important part, 157 08:52.020 --> 08:55.230 you're going to get your app password show up here, and 158 08:55.230 --> 08:58.660 I want you to select all of it and copy it, 159 09:00.210 --> 09:04.293 and then you'll be able to paste it inside your code. 160 09:05.144 --> 09:07.920 Once we've done all of this, 161 09:07.920 --> 09:11.040 then we can go back and hit Run again, 162 09:11.040 --> 09:13.260 and you'll see this time we see 163 09:13.260 --> 09:15.683 the, "Process finished with exit code 0", 164 09:15.683 --> 09:19.590 which means all of the code ran successfully. 165 09:19.590 --> 09:22.620 And now if I take a look at my Sent box, 166 09:22.620 --> 09:26.190 you can see that I've got this message that's been sent. 167 09:26.190 --> 09:28.710 And if I take a look at the email address 168 09:28.710 --> 09:30.960 which the email was sent to, 169 09:30.960 --> 09:33.120 then you can see that in my inbox 170 09:33.120 --> 09:34.770 there's actually nothing here. 171 09:34.770 --> 09:36.951 But if you take a look inside spam, 172 09:36.951 --> 09:39.600 then there is our brilliant email 173 09:39.600 --> 09:41.973 that came from our Python code. 174 09:43.500 --> 09:46.890 So first thing I'm going to do is change that to Not spam 175 09:46.890 --> 09:49.980 to make sure that it goes into the actual inbox. 176 09:49.980 --> 09:52.200 And the next thing we want to be able to do is 177 09:52.200 --> 09:55.890 how can we make our email seem less like spam? 178 09:55.890 --> 09:59.894 So an email without a subject headline is prime target 179 09:59.894 --> 10:02.460 for being filtered as spam. 180 10:02.460 --> 10:04.830 So let's go into our email 181 10:04.830 --> 10:07.680 and see how we can add a subject line. 182 10:07.680 --> 10:08.940 It's pretty simple. 183 10:08.940 --> 10:12.300 It goes inside the message parameter 184 10:12.300 --> 10:16.410 and all we have to do is just write the word subject, colon, 185 10:16.410 --> 10:18.450 and then we can put in whatever it is 186 10:18.450 --> 10:22.080 that we want to use as the subject of the email, like this. 187 10:22.080 --> 10:25.830 Now, how do you put in the content or the body of the email? 188 10:25.830 --> 10:30.690 Well, you add two new lines using \n \n 189 10:30.690 --> 10:32.460 and then you can put the content. 190 10:32.460 --> 10:36.607 So, "This is the body of my email." 191 10:36.607 --> 10:39.210 And let's just split this up 192 10:39.210 --> 10:41.163 so it's a little bit easier to read. 193 10:43.620 --> 10:46.463 And now I can hit Run again. 194 10:46.463 --> 10:48.840 And once that's done, you can see 195 10:48.840 --> 10:51.418 that in my Gmail in the Sent folder 196 10:51.418 --> 10:56.418 that this message now has a subject line and a body. 197 10:57.120 --> 11:00.230 And it's the same thing when I go to my... 198 11:06.120 --> 11:09.210 And when I take a look at this new email that came through, 199 11:09.210 --> 11:11.340 you can see the Subject line 200 11:11.340 --> 11:14.283 and the body of the email being separated. 201 11:15.180 --> 11:17.640 Now we can actually avoid having 202 11:17.640 --> 11:20.490 to write this line connection.close(), 203 11:20.490 --> 11:24.210 if we do the same trick as we did with file opening, 204 11:24.210 --> 11:26.640 we use the "with" keyword. 205 11:26.640 --> 11:31.640 So we can say that with smtp.SMTP, to create the connection, 206 11:31.860 --> 11:34.980 and then we save that as the connection, 207 11:34.980 --> 11:37.710 then we can indent all of the rest 208 11:37.710 --> 11:39.780 of the code inside this block. 209 11:39.780 --> 11:43.350 And once it's done with sending the email, 210 11:43.350 --> 11:47.010 it will close off that connection automatically. 211 11:47.010 --> 11:50.160 So this is how you could send email using Python 212 11:50.160 --> 11:51.870 and smtplib. 213 11:51.870 --> 11:54.660 Now there's quite a few things here that are prone 214 11:54.660 --> 11:58.290 to errors, especially given that we're typing a lot 215 11:58.290 --> 12:01.963 of things in plain text, like our email, 216 12:01.963 --> 12:04.350 our password and a bunch of things. 217 12:04.350 --> 12:08.220 So if you are getting errors when you are running your code 218 12:08.220 --> 12:11.100 or if it's not doing what you expect it to, 219 12:11.100 --> 12:14.910 make sure that you've checked against all of these strings 220 12:14.910 --> 12:18.150 and it's actually what you expected it to be. 221 12:18.150 --> 12:20.700 Secondly, make sure that whichever account 222 12:20.700 --> 12:23.370 you're sending from that you actually go ahead 223 12:23.370 --> 12:27.390 into the account and modify the security settings. 224 12:27.390 --> 12:29.970 For example, let's say I wanted to send 225 12:29.970 --> 12:34.230 from this email address, so I'm going to put that in here. 226 12:34.230 --> 12:37.140 And then in this case, the email server I need 227 12:37.140 --> 12:40.260 to connect to will be Yahoo's email server, 228 12:40.260 --> 12:43.950 which is under the URL that I showed you before, 229 12:43.950 --> 12:48.907 smtp.mail.yahoo.com. 230 12:50.160 --> 12:52.590 And that is actually not enough. 231 12:52.590 --> 12:54.700 So let me just change my recipient 232 12:58.440 --> 13:00.090 and I hit Run. 233 13:00.090 --> 13:02.370 This is the error that you'll see. 234 13:02.370 --> 13:05.130 It says SMTP server disconnected, 235 13:05.130 --> 13:07.590 connection unexpectedly closed. 236 13:07.590 --> 13:10.200 Now this could be down to a number of reasons. 237 13:10.200 --> 13:13.692 For example, a typo in this part, 238 13:13.692 --> 13:16.260 but also if your account doesn't 239 13:16.260 --> 13:18.840 actually allow less secure apps. 240 13:18.840 --> 13:21.570 So on Yahoo, the process is a little bit different. 241 13:21.570 --> 13:25.290 You have to go into your account, go to Account Info 242 13:25.290 --> 13:27.213 and then go to Account security. 243 13:28.710 --> 13:30.940 And you'll have to log in again 244 13:33.780 --> 13:37.098 and Generate a new app password. 245 13:37.098 --> 13:39.360 So we're going to create a new app 246 13:39.360 --> 13:43.140 and we're going to give it a custom name, Python code. 247 13:43.140 --> 13:45.030 And then click Generate, 248 13:45.030 --> 13:50.030 and now we have an app password to use for our Python code. 249 13:51.060 --> 13:55.020 So now back over here, we change this password 250 13:55.020 --> 13:57.990 to the one that we just copied over. 251 13:57.990 --> 14:01.680 And now if I hit Run, that error should go away 252 14:01.680 --> 14:05.310 and we should get, "Process finished with exit code 0". 253 14:05.310 --> 14:08.943 And when I take a look over here in my Inbox, 254 14:11.430 --> 14:15.393 I've got my email from appbrewerytesting@yahoo.com. 255 14:17.250 --> 14:21.060 So check your Security settings, check your spam 256 14:21.060 --> 14:24.587 and check that you haven't made any typos. 257 14:24.587 --> 14:26.880 And if none of that works, 258 14:26.880 --> 14:30.000 then just simply try doing everything I did in the video 259 14:30.000 --> 14:35.000 but with a new email account that you set up with Gmail. 260 14:35.040 --> 14:37.860 Then you can use the same SMTP address 261 14:37.860 --> 14:39.480 and the same process that you saw 262 14:39.480 --> 14:41.253 in the video to try this out.