Sending emails via Gmail with Python

Whenever I need to send files from work to home I use gmail. Usually this email message consists of one single file (that may be a tarball) and has the file name for subject. In the "Automate Everything" spirit, I decided to build a script to do this task for me.

The first thing I had to do was find out how to send an email with an attachment via gmail. It wasn't too hard to find this information around the web, but it still took me the best part of an hour. So here's a simple Python script that sends an email with an attachment:

#!/usr/bin/python

import smtplib
from email.MIMEMultipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.MIMEBase import MIMEBase
from email.MIMEText import MIMEText
from email import Encoders
import os

gmail_user = "your_email@gmail.com"
gmail_pwd = "your_password"

def mail(to, subject, text, attach):
   msg = MIMEMultipart()

   msg['From'] = gmail_user
   msg['To'] = to
   msg['Subject'] = subject

   msg.attach(MIMEText(text))

   part = MIMEBase('application', 'octet-stream')
   part.set_payload(open(attach, 'rb').read())
   Encoders.encode_base64(part)
   part.add_header('Content-Disposition',
           'attachment; filename="%s"' % os.path.basename(attach))
   msg.attach(part)

   mailServer = smtplib.SMTP("smtp.gmail.com", 587)
   mailServer.ehlo()
   mailServer.starttls()
   mailServer.ehlo()
   mailServer.login(gmail_user, gmail_pwd)
   mailServer.sendmail(gmail_user, to, msg.as_string())
   # Should be mailServer.quit(), but that crashes...
   mailServer.close()

mail("some.person@some.address.com",
   "Hello from python!",
   "This is a email sent with python",
   "my_picture.jpg")