How to attach CSV file with MIME/SMTP and email?

Question

I’m attempting to attach a CSV file and email it.

Currently, I am doing the following but it simply attaches an empty CSV file, rather than attaching the CSV file I have in the same directory:

import smtplib

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.base import MIMEBase
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.utils import COMMASPACE
from email import encoders


def email_attachment():
    SUBJECT = 'Subject string'

    msg = MIMEMultipart()
    msg['From'] = '[email protected]'
    msg['To'] = COMMASPACE.join(['[email protected]'])
    msg['Subject'] = SUBJECT

    part = MIMEBase('application', "octet-stream")
    #    I have a CSV file named `attachthisfile.csv` in the same directory that I'd like to attach and email
    part.set_payload(open("./attachthisfile.csv", "rb").read())
    encoders.encode_base64(part)

    part.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment', filename='attachthisfile.csv')

    msg.attach(part)

    smtpObj = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.mail.yahoo.com', 587)
    smtpObj.ehlo()
    smtpObj.starttls()
    smtpObj.login('[email protected]', 'myemailpassword')
    smtpObj.sendmail('[email protected]', '[email protected]', msg.as_string())

    smtpObj.quit()

So my question is, what could I be doing wrong? How can I attach the CSV file in the same directory and email, rather than creating an empty CSV file and naming it the same, and emailing?

Solution

The issue seems to be with this line:

part.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment; filename=“attachthisfile.csv"')

It contains a Non-ASCII character '\xe2' after filename=. It's the old ascii encoding problem, in this case it's: “ vs "

As a side note, you can also change the add_header arguments to match this Python docs example:

part.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment', filename='attachthisfile.csv')

Full working example:

import smtplib
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.base import MIMEBase
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.utils import COMMASPACE
from email import encoders

SUBJECT = 'Subject string'
FILENAME = 'attachthisfile.csv'
FILEPATH = './attachthisfile.csv'
MY_EMAIL = '[email protected]'
MY_PASSWORD = '********************'
TO_EMAIL = '[email protected]'
SMTP_SERVER = 'smtp.mail.yahoo.com'
SMTP_PORT = 587

msg = MIMEMultipart()
msg['From'] = MY_EMAIL
msg['To'] = COMMASPACE.join([TO_EMAIL])
msg['Subject'] = SUBJECT

part = MIMEBase('application', "octet-stream")
part.set_payload(open(FILEPATH, "rb").read())
encoders.encode_base64(part)
part.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment', filename=FILENAME)  # or
# part.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment; filename="attachthisfile.csv"')
msg.attach(part)

smtpObj = smtplib.SMTP(SMTP_SERVER, SMTP_PORT)
smtpObj.ehlo()
smtpObj.starttls()
smtpObj.login(MY_EMAIL, MY_PASSWORD)
smtpObj.sendmail(MY_EMAIL, TO_EMAIL, msg.as_string())
smtpObj.quit()

Edit: Added full example

Comments

[Jo Ko]

Appreciate your response! Gave it an attempt as suggested but still no luck

[Jo Ko]

Thank you for the revision and gave it a try, but it still just attaches a new CSV file named attachthisfile.csv rather than grabbing the existing attachthisfile.csv in the same directory.

[brennan]

Weird! I tested it from yahoo to gmail. Were all the non-ascii backticks and quotes replaced? Are you running Python 2 or 3? What is the encoding of the csv file?

[brennan]

Maybe make start with a fresh utf-8 test csv to rule that out? stackoverflow.com/questions/18766955/…

[Jo Ko]

Yup sure did. Running Python 2. Sorry but how do I determine the encoding of the csv file?

[brennan]

Maybe try this on your python files as well as your csv stackoverflow.com/a/11021413/6085135

[scharfmn]

If you're stuck in Python 2 and stdlib, this really works for attaching a csv. Thank you.