mailcomposer 0.2.4

API for composing emails through an external application

mailcomposer aims to provide a simple, cross-platform interface for composing emails through an external application like Microsoft Outlook. Some reasons you might use it are:

• You're behind a corporate firewall, and are only able to send email using Outlook.
• You don't have an SMTP server, or don't want the hassle of using smtplib.
• You just prefer your desktop email client.

Here's how easy it is to use:

# This automatically selects an appropriate email application
from mailcomposer import MailComposer
mc = MailComposer()

# Set some message headers
mc.to = "[e-mail]"
mc.subject = "Testing mailcomposer"

# Set the message body
mc.body = "This is a demonstration of the mailcomposer package."

# Attach this README file
mc.attach_file("README.md")

# Display the message in your email application
mc.display()

The mailcomposer module can also be called as a script from the command line. When used this way, it provides an interface similar to the Unix mail utility. For more information, try python -m mailcomposer --help.

Features

Notable features include:

• Straightforward API
• Cross-platform
• Runs on both Python 2 and 3
• Uses your desktop email client; no SMTP server required
• To, CC, and BCC fields accept single recipients or Python lists
• Messages can be composed in either plain-text or HTML format
• Attachments are easy -- just pass the filename

Supported Email Applications

Supported email applications currently include:

• Microsoft Outlook (Windows only; requires pywin32)
• Mozilla Thunderbird

On Unix systems, mailcomposer can also access other email applications via the xdg-email utility from xdg-utils. However, some features like setting the body format are not supported using xdg-email.