How to set a charset in email using smtplib in Python 2.7?

Question

I\'m writing a simple smtp-sender with authentification. Here\'s my code

    SMTPserver, sender, destination = \'smtp.googlemail.com\', \'user@gmail.com\', [         


        

Answer 1

from email.header import Header
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

def contains_non_ascii_characters(str):
    return not all(ord(c) < 128 for c in str)   

def add_header(message, header_name, header_value):
    if contains_non_ascii_characters(header_value):
        h = Header(header_value, 'utf-8')
        message[header_name] = h
    else:
        message[header_name] = header_value    
    return message

............
msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
msg = add_header(msg, 'Subject', subject)

if contains_non_ascii_characters(html):
    html_text = MIMEText(html.encode('utf-8'), 'html','utf-8')
else:
    html_text = MIMEText(html, 'html')    

if(contains_non_ascii_characters(plain)):
    plain_text = MIMEText(plain.encode('utf-8'),'plain','utf-8') 
else:
    plain_text = MIMEText(plain,'plain')

msg.attach(plain_text)
msg.attach(html_text)

This should give you your proper encoding for both text and headers regardless of whether your text contains non-ASCII characters or not. It also means you won't automatically use base64 encoding unnecessarily.