How to get line breaks in e-mail sent using Python's smtplib?

Question

I have written a script that writes a message to a text file and also sends it as an email. Everything goes well, except the email finally appears to be all in one line.

Answer 1

You have your message body declared to have HTML content ("Content-Type: text/html"). The HTML code for line break is
. You should either change your content type to text/plain or use the HTML markup for line breaks instead of plain \n as the latter gets ignored when rendering a HTML document.

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As a side note, also have a look at the email package. There are some classes that can simplify the definition of E-Mail messages for you (with examples).

For example you could try (untested):

import smtplib
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

# define content
recipients = ["recipient_id@yahoo.com"]
sender = "sender_id@gmail.com"
subject = "report reminder"
body = """
Dear Student,
Please send your report
Thank you for your attention
"""

# make up message
msg = MIMEText(body)
msg['Subject'] = subject
msg['From'] = sender
msg['To'] = ", ".join(recipients)

# sending
session = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com', 587)
session.starttls()
session.login(sender, 'my password')
send_it = session.sendmail(sender, recipients, msg.as_string())
session.quit()