MIMEText UTF-8 encode problems when sending email

Question

Here is a part of my code which sends an email:

servidor = smtplib.SMTP()
servidor.connect(HOST, PORT)
servidor.login(user, usenha)
assunto = str(self.lineEdit.text())
para = str(globe_email)             
texto = self.textEdit.toPlainText()
textos = str(texto)
corpo = MIMEText(textos.encode('utf-8'), _charset='utf-8')
corpo['From'] = user
corpo['To'] = para
corpo['Subject'] = assunto
servidor.sendmail(user, [para], corpo.as_string())

Everything is ok except the part of the Subject. When I try to send a string with special characters (e.g. "ação") it raises this error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 1-2: ordinal not in range(128)

How can I send emails with special characters in the Subject of MIMEText?

Solution 1

It seems that, in python3, a Header object is needed to encode a Subject as utf-8:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.header import Header
s = 'ação'
m = MIMEText(s, 'plain', 'utf-8')
m['Subject'] = Header(s, 'utf-8')
print(repr(m.as_string()))

Output:

'Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"\nMIME-Version: 1.0\nContent-Transfer-Encoding: base64\nSubject: =?utf-8?b?YcOnw6Nv?=\n\nYcOnw6Nv\n

So the original script would become:

servidor = smtplib.SMTP()
servidor.connect(HOST, PORT)
servidor.login(user, usenha)
assunto = str(self.lineEdit.text())
para = str(globe_email)             
texto = str(self.textEdit.toPlainText())
corpo = MIMEText(texto, 'plain', 'utf-8')
corpo['From'] = user
corpo['To'] = para
corpo['Subject'] = Header(assunto, 'utf-8')
servidor.sendmail(user, [para], corpo.as_string())

Solution 2

I've improved the answer with other way to connect with the server and loggin, because the other way i had the problem to authenticate with the application and people can see all the libraries that should be use

from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.header import Header
import smtplib

user='[email protected]'
pwd='password'
server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.office365.com', 587) #it works with outlook
server.ehlo()
server.starttls()
server.login(user, pwd)
assunto = 'Teste'
para = '[email protected]'
texto = 'Niterói é uma cidade incrível '
corpo = MIMEText(texto, 'plain', 'utf-8')
corpo['From'] = user
corpo['To'] = para
corpo['Subject'] = Header(assunto, 'utf-8')
try:
    server.sendmail(user, [para], corpo.as_string())
    print('email was sent')
except:
    print('error')
server.quit()

Comments

[abestrad]

Thanks for your answer, but can you please expand on this answer? Review [How do I write a good answer?]( stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-answer)

[Al Martins]

It seems? It is on the documentation: docs.python.org/2/library/email.header.html

[ekhumoro]

@AlMartins Yes, "seems". I just tested this with Python-3.2.6, Python-3.3.0 and Python-3.8.6, and I got the exact same output whether a Header object was used or not. This is probably due to compat32. Presumably the OP was using an earlier version of Python3 which had different behaviour. So it seems the current documentation is somewhat misleading, since a Header object isn't necessarily required. However, for the sake of backward compatibility, it seems best to continue using it.

[Al Martins]

Not successful on Python 3 using Flask. html.encode('utf-8') works.