1 00:00:00,690 --> 00:00:01,800 Instructor: The first thing we have 2 00:00:01,800 --> 00:00:06,390 to figure out is how exactly does email work? 3 00:00:06,390 --> 00:00:08,340 We all know that we can log onto Gmail 4 00:00:08,340 --> 00:00:11,970 or yahoo.com and we can start filling out an email. 5 00:00:11,970 --> 00:00:15,240 It's pretty much second nature to everybody by now. 6 00:00:15,240 --> 00:00:18,240 But what actually happens behind the scenes? 7 00:00:18,240 --> 00:00:20,430 Well, let's say that we have a sender, 8 00:00:20,430 --> 00:00:25,430 angela@gmail.com and a recipient, timmy@yahoo.com. 9 00:00:25,650 --> 00:00:28,980 Now, in order to send this email from my Gmail account 10 00:00:28,980 --> 00:00:33,300 to another email account, what happens behind the scene is 11 00:00:33,300 --> 00:00:35,790 that there's a Gmail mail server, 12 00:00:35,790 --> 00:00:37,980 which will receive my message. 13 00:00:37,980 --> 00:00:40,380 And then there's a Yahoo Mail server, 14 00:00:40,380 --> 00:00:43,770 which will store the message until Timmy logs 15 00:00:43,770 --> 00:00:47,670 onto his computer and logs onto yahoo.com, 16 00:00:47,670 --> 00:00:50,823 which downloads the email from the Yahoo Mail server. 17 00:00:51,690 --> 00:00:56,329 So this email is gonna move between all of these steps. 18 00:00:56,329 --> 00:00:58,080 And in order to do this, 19 00:00:58,080 --> 00:01:00,990 it relies on something called SMTP, 20 00:01:00,990 --> 00:01:03,726 the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. 21 00:01:03,726 --> 00:01:07,530 And this contains all of the rules that determine 22 00:01:07,530 --> 00:01:11,160 how an email is received by mail servers passed 23 00:01:11,160 --> 00:01:12,930 onto the next mail server 24 00:01:12,930 --> 00:01:15,993 and how email can be sent around the internet. 25 00:01:17,340 --> 00:01:19,683 Now, a good analogy for SMTP is 26 00:01:19,683 --> 00:01:24,240 if you imagine these mail servers as a post office 27 00:01:24,240 --> 00:01:27,210 and Timmy's computer being the mailbox. 28 00:01:27,210 --> 00:01:32,210 Then SMTP is basically the postman who knows how to handle 29 00:01:32,220 --> 00:01:36,120 the email and take it to various post offices 30 00:01:36,120 --> 00:01:39,510 and eventually put it into Timmy's computer. 31 00:01:39,510 --> 00:01:42,990 So in Python there's a module called smtplib, 32 00:01:42,990 --> 00:01:47,460 which allows us to use SMTP to send our email 33 00:01:47,460 --> 00:01:50,550 to any address on the internet. 34 00:01:50,550 --> 00:01:54,360 To start, I recommend setting up two fresh email accounts. 35 00:01:54,360 --> 00:01:57,060 Create a new email account with Gmail 36 00:01:57,060 --> 00:02:00,360 and also create a new email account with Yahoo. 37 00:02:00,360 --> 00:02:03,000 These new email accounts will be perfect 38 00:02:03,000 --> 00:02:04,260 for testing your code 39 00:02:04,260 --> 00:02:06,930 and following along with the video tutorials. 40 00:02:06,930 --> 00:02:09,000 Plus, we'll be making those email accounts 41 00:02:09,000 --> 00:02:11,490 a little bit less secure to test our code. 42 00:02:11,490 --> 00:02:12,900 So that's another reason to set up 43 00:02:12,900 --> 00:02:15,750 some testing email addresses for now. 44 00:02:15,750 --> 00:02:18,150 After you've set up your new email accounts, 45 00:02:18,150 --> 00:02:21,150 head over to the course resources and download the zip file 46 00:02:21,150 --> 00:02:23,300 with the starting code for today's lessons. 47 00:02:24,270 --> 00:02:27,390 And then we're gonna open that up using PyCharm. 48 00:02:27,390 --> 00:02:30,582 Now I want you to take a look inside the starting project. 49 00:02:30,582 --> 00:02:33,150 There is a main.py file 50 00:02:33,150 --> 00:02:36,180 and there's also a quotes.txt file. 51 00:02:36,180 --> 00:02:37,710 Don't worry about this file for now. 52 00:02:37,710 --> 00:02:39,060 We're gonna come back to it 53 00:02:39,060 --> 00:02:41,640 when we explore the datetime module. 54 00:02:41,640 --> 00:02:44,850 For now, we're gonna be working within the main.py. 55 00:02:44,850 --> 00:02:49,481 And I wanna show you how you can use this smtplib library 56 00:02:49,481 --> 00:02:54,377 to start sending emails straight from your Python code. 57 00:02:54,377 --> 00:02:58,290 As always, we import the module smtplib 58 00:02:58,290 --> 00:03:00,930 and then we can start using it. 59 00:03:00,930 --> 00:03:05,095 Once we've imported this SMTP library essentially, 60 00:03:05,095 --> 00:03:09,330 we can use it to create a new SMTP object. 61 00:03:09,330 --> 00:03:12,600 So we're gonna call that object a new connection 62 00:03:12,600 --> 00:03:15,000 because it's basically a way for us to be able 63 00:03:15,000 --> 00:03:20,000 to connect to our email provider's SMTP email server. 64 00:03:20,010 --> 00:03:23,130 We're gonna do this by tapping into the smtplib 65 00:03:23,130 --> 00:03:27,810 and then creating a object from the SMTP class. 66 00:03:27,810 --> 00:03:29,670 Now, when we create this object, 67 00:03:29,670 --> 00:03:33,759 one of the things that we should specify is the location 68 00:03:33,759 --> 00:03:37,648 of our email providers SMTP server. 69 00:03:37,648 --> 00:03:42,648 Now for Gmail, it's simply smtp.gmail.com 70 00:03:43,140 --> 00:03:45,870 but it's different for every email provider. 71 00:03:45,870 --> 00:03:50,310 So that means if your email ends in @gmail.com 72 00:03:50,310 --> 00:03:52,620 then this would be how you would connect 73 00:03:52,620 --> 00:03:54,450 to your email server. 74 00:03:54,450 --> 00:03:56,010 In our case, I've created 75 00:03:56,010 --> 00:04:01,010 a testing email called appbreweryinfo@gmail.com. 76 00:04:02,160 --> 00:04:06,000 And this part that's before the @ sign is 77 00:04:06,000 --> 00:04:09,390 the identity of my email account. 78 00:04:09,390 --> 00:04:11,850 And the part after the @ sign is 79 00:04:11,850 --> 00:04:14,910 the identity of my email provider. 80 00:04:14,910 --> 00:04:19,659 So in my case, I need to connect to smtp.gmail.com. 81 00:04:19,659 --> 00:04:23,160 But if you have a different email provider, 82 00:04:23,160 --> 00:04:27,240 for example if you're with Hotmail, it's smtp.live.com. 83 00:04:27,240 --> 00:04:32,190 And if you are with Yahoo, it's smtp.mail.yahoo.com. 84 00:04:32,190 --> 00:04:35,190 And if you're with a completely different email provider 85 00:04:35,190 --> 00:04:38,670 than simply just Google your email provider 86 00:04:38,670 --> 00:04:40,590 and the SMTP information. 87 00:04:40,590 --> 00:04:42,660 And you should find an article somewhere 88 00:04:42,660 --> 00:04:46,162 that describes a URL that looks something like this. 89 00:04:46,162 --> 00:04:48,780 Once I've created my connection, 90 00:04:48,780 --> 00:04:52,110 the next thing I need to do is to go ahead 91 00:04:52,110 --> 00:04:55,080 and call start TLS. 92 00:04:55,080 --> 00:04:59,100 Now, TLS stands for Transport Layer Security 93 00:04:59,100 --> 00:05:00,815 and it's a way of securing 94 00:05:00,815 --> 00:05:04,170 our connection to our email server. 95 00:05:04,170 --> 00:05:06,810 So that way when we're sending an email, 96 00:05:06,810 --> 00:05:09,420 if somebody else intercepts our email 97 00:05:09,420 --> 00:05:12,720 somewhere along the line and they try to read it. 98 00:05:12,720 --> 00:05:16,383 Because this is enabled that message will be encrypted 99 00:05:16,383 --> 00:05:18,720 and it'll be impossible for them to read 100 00:05:18,720 --> 00:05:21,360 what is in the content of our email. 101 00:05:21,360 --> 00:05:24,620 So this line basically will make this connection secure. 102 00:05:24,620 --> 00:05:27,720 Now, once we've secured our connection, 103 00:05:27,720 --> 00:05:30,990 the next thing to do is to actually log in. 104 00:05:30,990 --> 00:05:33,249 So we'll call connection.login 105 00:05:33,249 --> 00:05:38,223 and here we have to provide a username and a password. 106 00:05:38,223 --> 00:05:41,460 So the username is simply the email 107 00:05:41,460 --> 00:05:44,940 that we use to log on to our email service. 108 00:05:44,940 --> 00:05:49,560 So in my case, it's just my email and the password. 109 00:05:49,560 --> 00:05:52,497 I've just made up a new password. 110 00:05:52,497 --> 00:05:57,497 So my made up password is ABCD1234 and then two brackets. 111 00:06:02,760 --> 00:06:07,260 And once I've logged in to my email provider, 112 00:06:07,260 --> 00:06:11,970 the final thing I wanna do is to actually send my mail. 113 00:06:11,970 --> 00:06:15,120 Now the from address is my email 114 00:06:15,120 --> 00:06:18,270 and the to address is the person 115 00:06:18,270 --> 00:06:20,550 who I want to send the email to. 116 00:06:20,550 --> 00:06:21,383 So I've set up 117 00:06:21,383 --> 00:06:25,227 a new dummy account called appbrewerytesting@yahoo.com. 118 00:06:28,500 --> 00:06:33,150 And make sure that you haven't got any typos in your email, 119 00:06:33,150 --> 00:06:38,150 your password, the SMTP URL or the recipient email address. 120 00:06:40,080 --> 00:06:43,830 Now finally, the last thing we wanna add is the message. 121 00:06:43,830 --> 00:06:47,970 So this is what we actually want to send in our email. 122 00:06:47,970 --> 00:06:50,580 And just like we did with our file 123 00:06:50,580 --> 00:06:53,820 when we opened it at the very end, once we're done with it 124 00:06:53,820 --> 00:06:56,190 we're going to close it off as well. 125 00:06:56,190 --> 00:06:58,563 So now we can go ahead and hit run. 126 00:07:00,127 --> 00:07:04,230 And you might get a number of errors at this point. 127 00:07:04,230 --> 00:07:06,644 Now it's important that if you do get an error, 128 00:07:06,644 --> 00:07:10,200 then you first check to make sure that you haven't got 129 00:07:10,200 --> 00:07:15,200 any typos here, here, here, or here. 130 00:07:15,870 --> 00:07:18,720 But once you've checked that through, then the next thing 131 00:07:18,720 --> 00:07:21,614 you can do is you can actually look at this error code 132 00:07:21,614 --> 00:07:24,210 and follow the URL. 133 00:07:24,210 --> 00:07:28,920 Now in our case, the reason is because by default, 134 00:07:28,920 --> 00:07:33,420 Gmail doesn't just let anybody access your email account. 135 00:07:33,420 --> 00:07:35,760 And you have other ways of making 136 00:07:35,760 --> 00:07:38,340 your account even more secure. 137 00:07:38,340 --> 00:07:42,420 In order to send email from a Gmail account with Python, 138 00:07:42,420 --> 00:07:44,310 the first thing you have to do is create 139 00:07:44,310 --> 00:07:47,010 a special password for your application. 140 00:07:47,010 --> 00:07:50,940 This means you have to go to the security settings 141 00:07:50,940 --> 00:07:53,010 for your Google account. 142 00:07:53,010 --> 00:07:54,540 So if you're inside Gmail, 143 00:07:54,540 --> 00:07:57,810 go ahead and click on your profile. 144 00:07:57,810 --> 00:08:02,363 Go to manage your Google account and then go to security. 145 00:08:02,363 --> 00:08:04,920 Now while you're here you first have 146 00:08:04,920 --> 00:08:07,083 to turn on two step verification. 147 00:08:13,470 --> 00:08:16,050 Once you've confirmed using your phone, 148 00:08:16,050 --> 00:08:19,030 go ahead and turn on two step verification 149 00:08:20,250 --> 00:08:24,330 and then go back to the security page. 150 00:08:24,330 --> 00:08:25,830 And now you should be able to see 151 00:08:25,830 --> 00:08:28,800 this section app passwords show up. 152 00:08:28,800 --> 00:08:32,130 Go ahead and click on it and enter your password 153 00:08:32,130 --> 00:08:33,630 for your Google account again. 154 00:08:35,073 --> 00:08:38,159 (rapid typing) 155 00:08:38,159 --> 00:08:42,626 And then go ahead and create a other type of app. 156 00:08:42,626 --> 00:08:47,627 And we'll name it Birthday Wisher and click generate. 157 00:08:49,920 --> 00:08:52,020 Now here's the really important part. 158 00:08:52,020 --> 00:08:55,230 You're gonna get your app password show up here. 159 00:08:55,230 --> 00:08:58,660 I want you to select all of it and copy it 160 00:09:00,210 --> 00:09:04,293 and then you'll be able to paste it inside your code. 161 00:09:05,144 --> 00:09:07,920 Once we've done all of this, 162 00:09:07,920 --> 00:09:11,040 then we can go back and hit run again. 163 00:09:11,040 --> 00:09:13,260 And you'll see this time we see 164 00:09:13,260 --> 00:09:15,683 the process finish with exit code zero, 165 00:09:15,683 --> 00:09:19,590 which means all of the code ran successfully. 166 00:09:19,590 --> 00:09:22,620 And now if I take a look at my sent box, 167 00:09:22,620 --> 00:09:26,190 you can see that I've got this message that's been sent. 168 00:09:26,190 --> 00:09:28,710 And if I take a look at the email address 169 00:09:28,710 --> 00:09:30,960 which the email was sent to, 170 00:09:30,960 --> 00:09:33,120 then you can see that in my inbox 171 00:09:33,120 --> 00:09:34,770 there's actually nothing here. 172 00:09:34,770 --> 00:09:36,951 But if you take a look inside spam, 173 00:09:36,951 --> 00:09:39,600 then there is our brilliant email 174 00:09:39,600 --> 00:09:41,973 that came from our Python code. 175 00:09:43,500 --> 00:09:46,890 So first thing I'm gonna do is change that to not spam 176 00:09:46,890 --> 00:09:49,980 to make sure that it goes into the actual inbox. 177 00:09:49,980 --> 00:09:52,200 And the next thing we wanna be able to do is 178 00:09:52,200 --> 00:09:55,890 how can we make our email seem less like spam? 179 00:09:55,890 --> 00:09:59,894 So an email without a subject headline is prime target 180 00:09:59,894 --> 00:10:02,460 for being filtered as spam. 181 00:10:02,460 --> 00:10:04,830 So let's go into our email 182 00:10:04,830 --> 00:10:07,680 and see how we can add a subject line. 183 00:10:07,680 --> 00:10:08,940 It's pretty simple. 184 00:10:08,940 --> 00:10:12,300 It goes inside the message parameter 185 00:10:12,300 --> 00:10:16,410 and all we have to do is just write the word subject, colon. 186 00:10:16,410 --> 00:10:18,450 And then we can put in whatever it is 187 00:10:18,450 --> 00:10:22,080 that we wanna use as the subject of the email like this. 188 00:10:22,080 --> 00:10:25,830 Now, how do you put in the content or the body of the email? 189 00:10:25,830 --> 00:10:30,690 Well, you add two new lines using /n /n 190 00:10:30,690 --> 00:10:32,460 and then you can put the content. 191 00:10:32,460 --> 00:10:36,607 So this is the body of my email. 192 00:10:36,607 --> 00:10:39,210 And let's just split this up 193 00:10:39,210 --> 00:10:41,163 so it's a little bit easier to read. 194 00:10:43,620 --> 00:10:46,463 And now I can hit run again. 195 00:10:46,463 --> 00:10:48,840 And once that's done, you can see 196 00:10:48,840 --> 00:10:51,418 that in my Gmail in the sent folder 197 00:10:51,418 --> 00:10:56,418 that this message now has a subject line and a body. 198 00:10:57,120 --> 00:11:00,230 And it's the same thing when I go to my... 199 00:11:06,120 --> 00:11:09,210 And when I take a look at this new email that came through, 200 00:11:09,210 --> 00:11:11,340 you can see the subject line 201 00:11:11,340 --> 00:11:14,283 and the body of the email being separated. 202 00:11:15,180 --> 00:11:17,640 Now we can actually avoid having 203 00:11:17,640 --> 00:11:20,490 to write this line connection.close 204 00:11:20,490 --> 00:11:24,210 if we do the same trick as we did with file opening. 205 00:11:24,210 --> 00:11:26,640 We use the with keyword 206 00:11:26,640 --> 00:11:31,640 so we can say that with smtp.SMTP to create the connection 207 00:11:31,860 --> 00:11:34,980 and then we save that as the connection. 208 00:11:34,980 --> 00:11:37,710 Then we can indent all of the rest 209 00:11:37,710 --> 00:11:39,780 of the code inside this block. 210 00:11:39,780 --> 00:11:43,350 And once it's done with sending the email, 211 00:11:43,350 --> 00:11:47,010 it will close off that connection automatically. 212 00:11:47,010 --> 00:11:50,160 So this is how you could send email using Python 213 00:11:50,160 --> 00:11:51,870 and smtplib. 214 00:11:51,870 --> 00:11:54,660 Now there's quite a few things here that are prone 215 00:11:54,660 --> 00:11:58,290 to errors, especially given that we're typing a lot 216 00:11:58,290 --> 00:12:01,963 of things in plain text, like our email, 217 00:12:01,963 --> 00:12:04,350 our password and a bunch of things. 218 00:12:04,350 --> 00:12:08,220 So if you are getting errors when you are running your code 219 00:12:08,220 --> 00:12:11,100 or if it's not doing what you expect it to, 220 00:12:11,100 --> 00:12:14,910 make sure that you've checked against all of these strings 221 00:12:14,910 --> 00:12:18,150 and it's actually what you expected it to be. 222 00:12:18,150 --> 00:12:20,700 Secondly, make sure that whichever account 223 00:12:20,700 --> 00:12:23,370 you're sending from that you actually go ahead 224 00:12:23,370 --> 00:12:27,390 into the account and modify the security settings. 225 00:12:27,390 --> 00:12:29,970 For example, let's say I wanted to send 226 00:12:29,970 --> 00:12:34,230 from this email address, so I'm gonna put that in here. 227 00:12:34,230 --> 00:12:37,140 And then in this case, the email server I need 228 00:12:37,140 --> 00:12:40,260 to connect to will be Yahoo's email server, 229 00:12:40,260 --> 00:12:43,950 which is under the URL that I showed you before, 230 00:12:43,950 --> 00:12:48,907 smtp.mail.yahoo.com. 231 00:12:50,160 --> 00:12:52,590 And that is actually not enough. 232 00:12:52,590 --> 00:12:54,700 So let me just change my recipient 233 00:12:58,440 --> 00:13:00,090 and I hit run. 234 00:13:00,090 --> 00:13:02,370 This is the error that you'll see. 235 00:13:02,370 --> 00:13:05,130 It says SMTP server disconnected, 236 00:13:05,130 --> 00:13:07,590 connection unexpectedly closed. 237 00:13:07,590 --> 00:13:10,200 Now this could be down to a number of reasons. 238 00:13:10,200 --> 00:13:13,692 For example, a typo in this part. 239 00:13:13,692 --> 00:13:16,260 But also if your account doesn't 240 00:13:16,260 --> 00:13:18,840 actually allow less secure apps. 241 00:13:18,840 --> 00:13:21,570 So on Yahoo, the process is a little bit different. 242 00:13:21,570 --> 00:13:25,290 You have to go into your account, go to account info 243 00:13:25,290 --> 00:13:27,213 and then go to account security. 244 00:13:28,710 --> 00:13:30,940 And you'll have to log in again 245 00:13:33,780 --> 00:13:37,098 and generate a new app password. 246 00:13:37,098 --> 00:13:39,360 So we're gonna create a new app 247 00:13:39,360 --> 00:13:43,140 and we're gonna give it a custom name, Python code. 248 00:13:43,140 --> 00:13:45,030 And then click generate. 249 00:13:45,030 --> 00:13:50,030 And now we have a app password to use for our Python code. 250 00:13:51,060 --> 00:13:55,020 So now back over here, we change this password 251 00:13:55,020 --> 00:13:57,990 to the one that we just copied over. 252 00:13:57,990 --> 00:14:01,680 And now if I hit run, that error should go away 253 00:14:01,680 --> 00:14:05,310 and we should get process finished with exit code zero. 254 00:14:05,310 --> 00:14:08,943 And when I take a look over here in my inbox, 255 00:14:11,430 --> 00:14:15,393 I've got my email from appbrewerytesting@yahoo.com. 256 00:14:17,250 --> 00:14:21,060 So check your security settings, check your spam 257 00:14:21,060 --> 00:14:24,587 and check that you haven't made any typos. 258 00:14:24,587 --> 00:14:26,880 And if none of that works, 259 00:14:26,880 --> 00:14:30,000 then just simply try doing everything I did in the video 260 00:14:30,000 --> 00:14:35,000 but with a new email account that you set up with Gmail. 261 00:14:35,040 --> 00:14:37,860 Then you can use the same SMTP address 262 00:14:37,860 --> 00:14:39,480 and the same process that you saw 263 00:14:39,480 --> 00:14:41,253 in the video to try this out.