Gmail API - plaintext word wrapping

Question

When sending emails using the Gmail API, it places hard line breaks in the body at around 78 characters per line. A similar question about this can be found here.

Ho

Answer 1

I'm assuming you have a function similar to this:

1. def create_message(sender, to, cc, subject, message_body):
2.     message = MIMEText(message_body, 'html')
3.     message['to'] = to
4.     message['from'] = sender
5.     message['subject'] = subject
6.     message['cc'] = cc
7.     return {'raw': base64.urlsafe_b64encode(message.as_string())}

The one trick that finally worked for me, after all the attempts to modify the header values and payload dict (which is a member of the message object), was to set (line 2):

• message = MIMEText(message_body, 'html') <-- add the 'html' as the second parameter of the MIMEText object constructor

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The default code supplied by Google for their gmail API only tells you how to send plain text emails, but they hide how they're doing that. ala... message = MIMEText(message_body)

I had to look up the python class email.mime.text.MIMEText object. That's where you'll see this definition of the constructor for the MIMEText object:

• class email.mime.text.MIMEText(_text[, _subtype[, _charset]]) We want to explicitly pass it a value to the _subtype. In this case, we want to pass: 'html' as the _subtype.

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Now, you won't have anymore unexpected word wrapping applied to your messages by Google, or the Python mime.text.MIMEText object